Fair Early Drop: An Active Queue Management Scheme for the Control of Unresponsive Flows

In this paper, we present the Fair Early Drop (FED) scheme which aims to prevent the unfairness problem generated by unresponsive flows and treat the various kinds of transport traffic “fairly”. Unresponsive flows are managed by making sure they do not consume more than their fair share of network resources; that is, by dropping more packets from them. The dropping decision is simple with O(1) complexity. To reduce queuing delays, FED starts dropping packets once a flow exceeds its fair share of queuing space and does not wait until the queue is full to start dropping packets. FED has shown not only to be able to handle unresponsive traffic, but also to improve the fairness among TCP connections, maximize link utilization and minimize jitter and queuing delay.