Adaptive algorithm for providing flow protection in the Internet

The main goal of this paper is to provide flow protection and, hence, to provide better than best effort service on the Internet, in particular, to protect adaptive TCP flows in the presence of non-adaptive UDP flows. The solution of choice to achieve flow protection is to have routers implement fair bandwidth allocation. To achieve this goal, an adaptive fair queue management algorithm (modified version of FRED) is proposed. AFQ is made adaptive by dynamically varying the number of packets of flow that could be allowed into the buffer with average queue size and buffer size. The drop or accept decision for a packet is based on the buffer occupancy of the flow. Routers maintain per flow accounting for providing flow protection. Implementation complexity of AFQ is comparable to the existing fair queue management schemes such as FRED. The performance of the proposed scheme is better than FRED.