A dynamic buffer management scheme based on rate estimation in packet-switched networks

While traffic volume of real-time applications is rapidly increasing, current routers do not guarantee minimum QoS values of fairness and they drop packets in a random fashion. If routers provide a minimum QoS, resulting a less delay, reduced delay-jitter, more fairness, and smooth sending rates, TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) can be adopted for real-time applications. We propose a dynamic buffer management scheme that meets the requirements described above, and can be applied to TCP flow and to data flow for transfer of real-time applications. The proposed scheme consists of a virtual threshold function, an accurate and stable per-flow rate estimation, and a per-flow exponential drop probability. We discuss how this scheme motivates real-time applications to adopt TCP-friendly rate control