Using MRUL to Improve Network Fairness

Internet routers generally see packets from a fast flow more often than a slow flow. This suggests that network fairness may be improved without per-flow information. In this paper, we propose a scheme using most recently used list (MRUL) - a list storing statistics of limited active flows that sorted in most recently seen first mode - to improve the fairness of RED. Based on the list, our proposed scheme jointly considers the identification and punish of the fast and unresponsive fast flows, and the protection of slow flows. Its performance improvements are demonstrated with extensive simulations. Different from the previous proposals, the complexity of our proposed scheme is proportional to the size of the MRUL list but not coupled with the queue buffer size or the number of active flows, so it is scalable and suitable for various routers.