Design considerations for supporting TCP with per-flow queueing

In this paper, we investigate the extent to which fair queueing (and its variants), in conjunction with appropriately tailored buffer management schemes, can be used to achieve the following goals for TCP traffic: (1) alleviate the inherent unfairness of TCP towards connections with long round-trip times, (2) provide isolation when connections using different TCP versions share a bottleneck link (3) provide protection from TCP-unfriendly traffic sources (which might include TCP ACKs since they are not loss-responsive) and misbehaving users, (4) alleviate the effects of ACK compression in the presence of two-way traffic, (5) prevent users experiencing ACK loss (which causes their traffic to be bursty) from significantly affecting other connections, (6) provide low latency to interactive connections which share a bottleneck with “greedy” connections without reducing overall link utilization. The paper proposes new buffer management schemes to be used in conjunction with fair queueing, so as to achieve the above goals for TCP, and compares the performance of the proposed schemes to the performance obtained using random early detection (RED) for packet dropping