On the Properties of System-Wide Responsive Behavior

High contention of flows is associated with unstable network behavior and unmanageable resource administration, i.e., convergence to equilibrium becomes a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a new approach to control congestion. In this context, we present an algorithm for active queue management, to notify simultaneously all competing flows about incipient congestion. Typically, AQM schemes notify only a small portion of participating flows about congestion events. Our notification scheme, called global notifier (GN), allows for an immediate and less aggressive adjustment of transmission windows with three consequent properties: (i) fairness is improved, (ii) smoothness of responsive flows is improved and (iii) system utilization is better regulated between the knee and the cliff. We detail our algorithm and the corresponding responsive behavior of participating flows, and we highlight significant performance results gathered by simulations.