Network border patrol: preventing congestion collapse and promoting fairness in the Internet

The Internet´s excellent scalability and robustness result in part from the end-to-end nature of Internet congestion control. End-to-end congestion control algorithms alone, however, are unable to prevent the congestion collapse and unfairness created by applications that are unresponsive to network congestion. To address these maladies, we propose and investigate a novel congestion-avoidance mechanism called network border patrol (NBP). NBP entails the exchange of feedback between routers at the borders of a network in order to detect and restrict unresponsive traffic flows before they enter the network, thereby preventing congestion within the network. Moreover, NBP is complemented with the proposed enhanced core-stateless fair queueing (ECSFQ) mechanism, which provides fair bandwidth allocations to competing flows. Both NBP and ECSFQ are compliant with the Internet philosophy of pushing complexity toward the edges of the network whenever possible. Simulation results show that NBP effectively eliminates congestion collapse and that, when combined with ECSFQ, approximately max-min fair bandwidth allocations can be achieved for competing flows.