Fair Early Drop for the fair treatment of short-lived flows

In this paper an extension to the Fair Early Drop (FED) algorithm is proposed for the preferential treatment of short-lived flows (SLF) over long-lived flows (LLF). So that, SLFs are allowed to slip quickly through the network, while LLFs "fills in the gaps". FED will place a packet belonging to a SLF in the queue regardless of how many packets belonging to this flow exist in the queue. SLFs are bursty in nature, hence FED aims to accommodate and absorb these bursts. It is only under heavy congestion (i.e. queue overflow) that SLFs will suffer packet loss. In this case, not only SLFs, but all incoming traffic will suffer degradation in performance. A performance evaluation of the extended FED algorithm with other algorithms was conducted. FED demonstrated the best overall performance amongst those tested.