Journal of Systems Architecture 52 (2006) 359372 www.elsevier.

com/locate/sysarc

Random early detection with ow number estimation and queue length feedback control
Jung-Shian Li *, Yong-Shun Su
Department of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, 1 University Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan, ROC Received 30 July 2004; received in revised form 30 May 2005; accepted 26 September 2005 Available online 15 November 2005

Abstract We evaluate eects of parameters in queue management on performance using 2k factorial designs. Among these systematic and environmental parameters, number of ows and Pmax are two dominant factors aecting RED performance. Then, we propose a novel active queue management scheme, NRED, employing ow number estimation and queue length feedback control, which are motivated from Bloom lter and control theory, respectively. By estimation of number of active ows, NRED is more scalable than FRED which employs per-active-ow accounting. Furthermore, uctuation of queue length under NRED is smaller than BLUE, REM, SRED and DRED. Especially, NRED can stabilize queue length very fast even when a lot of ows suddenly crowd into the network. NRED is suitable to be deployed in todays networks where hot spot frequently occurs. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: RED; NRED; DRED; SRED; BLUE; REM; FRED; Bloom lter; Feedback control

1. Introduction In todays Internet, TCP is widely used to prevent congestion collapse. However, TCP detects congestion only by packet loss due to buer overow at a FIFO router. This behavior would cause a phenomenon called global synchronization [4] and it results in performance degradation. To avoid global synchronization, queue management schemes, such as RED [3,4], are proposed. Rather than waiting for buer overow, an arriving packet is probabilis* Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 6208 1107; fax: +886 6234 5482. E-mail address: jsli@mail.ncku.edu.tw (J.-S. Li).

tically dropped by a mechanism dependent on queue length of buer. Then, TCP senders are informed before congestion. The mechanism monitors average queue length at a router and a dropping probability is calculated accordingly. If the average queue length grows, it indicates that congestion will occur. Consequently, the dropping probability should also increase to prevent congestion. Although RED improves network performance, dierent RED parameter settings may have very distinct performances in various network conditions [1,2]. So, in the rst step of our study, we want to evaluate eects of factors, including systematic and environmental parameters, on RED performance. Therefore, 2k factorial designs [12] with

1383-7621/$ - see front matter 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.sysarc.2005.09.004

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dierent scenarios are used to nd the dominant factors. By the results of the factorial designs, we propose a novel queue management scheme, called NRED. Two novel mechanisms, dynamically estimating number of ows and measuring queue length to perform feedback control, are added in the proposed NRED. The estimator of number of ows and the feedback controller are motivated from Bloom lter [9] and DRED [8], respectively. Fluctuation of queue length under NRED is smaller than any existing queue management schemes, such as BLUE [2], REM [5], SRED [7], and DRED [8]. Especially, NRED can control the queue length eectively even when a lot of ows suddenly crowd into the network. Unlike FRED [21] which employs per-active-ow accounting, NRED estimates number of active ows. Consequently, NRED is much more scalable. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the existing queue management schemes, such as RED, BLUE, REM, SRED, DRED and FRED. Section 3 provides an evaluation of systematic and environmental parameters in RED queue management by 2k factorial designs. The dominant factors will be used for the design of a novel queue management scheme. Section 4 depicts our proposed NRED scheme. Section 5 provides simulation results. Section 6 presents our conclusions. 2. Related works Lots of proposed queue management schemes [2,6,7] are RED-oriented. The dierence of these schemes is mainly in the parameter-adjusting method. Their mechanisms for adaptation of dropping-probability in response to network condition are dierent. In this section, brief descriptions of these queue management schemes are given. These representative queue management schemes include Droptail, RED [4], BLUE [2], REM [6], SRED [7], and DRED [8]. For Droptail, arrival packets are dropped when queue overow occurs. Droptail incurs large queue length and high packet loss rate at congested links. Especially, Droptail results in a phenomenon, called global synchronization [4], when a lot of TCP ows compete in a bottleneck. The total throughput of TCP ows decreases when global synchronization occurs. It is really a simple queue management and does nothing to prevent congestion [1]. However, Droptail is the most widespread queue management scheme due to its simplicity.

Random early detection (RED) [24] is a queue management scheme that is intended to remedy the shortcomings of Droptail. RED implicitly noties one of sources of congestion by randomly dropping an arriving packet. The selected source is informed by the packet loss and its sending rate is reduced accordingly. Consequently, congestion is alleviated. The dropping probability of RED is decided by the queue length. An arriving packet may be dropped before the queue is full. It is an early congestion notication. The dropping probability is a function of average queue length. When the queue occupancy grows, congestion builds up. Then, the dropping probability increases in order to provide enough early congestion notications. The RED dropping probability function is a piece-wise linear function. It is dened by a triplet (minth, maxth, pmax). Upon a packet arrival, the packet is admitted into the queue if the average queue length qa is less than minth, or is dropped if larger than maxth. If qa is between minth and maxth, the arrival packet is randomly dropped with the probability dened by a linear function evaluated at qa. However, queue length is not a good indicator of severity of congestion and issues of congestion notications may be too bursty, leading to excessive loss, or too mild, failing to stop congestion building [1,2,17]. Several queue management schemes, such as BLUE, REM, SRED, and DRED, were proposed to improve the performance of RED. BLUE [2] uses queue length and link utilization as indicators of trac load and congestion. Drop rate is adjusted by the indicators. If the current queue size exceeds a predetermined threshold L, dropping probability is raised by a very small xed amount d1. Conversely, if the link is idle, dropping probability is reduced by a small xed amount d2. d1 and d2 are congurable parameters for BLUE. To avoid aggressive packet dropping, BLUE keeps a minimum interval, called freeze time, between two successive updates. However, if dominant RTT of ows or number of ows through the queue changes, the parameter settings may be not suitable and queue length oscillates [4]. To deploy Random Exponential Marking (REM) [5], routers must perform exponential marking and sources must be REM-aware. REM gives no incentive to cooperative sources. Furthermore, a properly calculated and xed design control constant must be known globally.

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Stabilized RED [7] estimates number of ows and adapts dropping probability accordingly. The estimation is mainly based on a zombie list which rst initializes the Hit parameter equal to 0 and creates an empty list. Sourcedestination addresses of each incoming packet are stored in the list. Once the list is full, an entry is randomly chosen from the list for each subsequent packet arrival, and its content is compared with those of the newcomer packet. If there is a match, Hit is set to 1. Otherwise, Hit is set to 0, and with a certain probability, the content of this entry may be replaced by the sourcedestination addresses of the newcomer packet. By this matchmismatch way, an approximate number of ows is estimated. However, the estimation converges very slowly and is heavily dependent on the size of zombie list. The estimated number of ows in SRED is inaccurate in most of time in a varied network environment. Dynamic RED (DRED) [8,16] wants to stabilize queue length q to a target T which is a predetermined value independent of number of ows or network trac load. It uses a simple feedback control approach to randomly drop packets in the queue. The actual queue length q sampled every units of time is fed back to generate an error signal e = q T. This error signal is used to adapt the dropping probability pd. If e becomes larger, pd is adjusted to a larger value to drop more packets. On the contrary, pd is adjusted to a smaller value, so that e can be kept as small as possible. DRED cannot react on change of network environment since it equips only a simple feedback control mechanism. Moreover, the setting of control gain in DRED is problematic. FRED [21] makes dierent dropping decisions over connections with dierent bandwidth usages by use of per-active-ow accounting. FRED provides better protections for bursty connections. In

addition, FRED is able to isolate ill-behaved greedy trac more eectively. However, per-ow maintenance is not scalable. Since the proposed queue management schemes are unable to eectively control the queue length in various network environments, we want to propose an ecient queue management scheme. 3. Evaluation of systematic and environmental parameters In most of queue management schemes, the current queue length is used to adapt the dropping probability. However, number of ows passing by is also an important factor to aect the performance of queue management. The eectiveness of existing queue management schemes is doubtful if a large number of ows go into the router simultaneously. That is the so-called hot spot. Here, we want to analyze the performance under dierent network conditions and parameter settings of RED to determine the dominant factor. The eect of a factor is unidirectional very often. In such cases, we could perform experiments at the minimum and maximum level of the factor. This will help us decide if the difference in performance is signicant enough to get the dominant factor. A 2k experimental design [12] is used to decide the eects of k factors, each of which has two alternatives or levels. Given k factors at two levels each, a total of 2k experiments are required. The analysis produces 2k eects. We will choose those factors that have signicant impact on the performance by analyzing the experimental results. We set up a simulation environment by the network simulator ns-2 [11], as shown in Fig. 1, where Sn and Dn denote the sender and the receiver of TCP ow n, respectively. Capacity and latency of each link are annotated in the gure. R1 is a RED router.

S1 S2

10 Mbps, 5 ms 10 Mbps, 5 ms

10 Mbps, 5 ms

D1 D2

45 Mbps, 5 ms

R1

R2

Sn
Fig. 1. A single bottleneck.

Dn

362 Table 1 Factors Factor n minth maxth pmax

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L1 Number of ows Minimum threshold in packets of RED Maximum threshold in packets of RED Maximum probability drop of RED A B C D 10 0 40 0.025

L2 100 20 60 0.25

Then, we can list 24 equations and solve these equations for qis. Then we can get the sum of square SSi due to factor i as follows [12]: SS A 24 q2 A ; ; . . . ; SS ABCD 24 q2 SS B 24 q2 ABCD ; XB SST SS i and fraction of variation of i SS i ; SST 4 3

The guideline provided in [18] is helpful for setting the range of RED parameters. The buer size is limited to 60 packets and each packet is 500 bytes. Each experiment was run for 20 s and queue length was recorded during 520 s. Each experiment was repeated 3 times. Table 1 shows the factors which we want to dissect. The design has four factors, each of which has two levels. Therefore, we have to do 24 experiments each time. Average queue length and queue length variation are of our concerns. When simulation results are substituted in the regression model of factorial designs [12], importance of each factor is decided by fraction of variation due to this factor. Let us dene four variables xA, xB, xC and xD as follows:  1 if factor L1; xW 1 1 if factor L2; where W 2 {A, B, C, D}, as shown in Table 1. A nonlinear regression model is l q0 qA xA qB xB qC xC qD xD qAB xA xB qAC xA xC qABC xA xB xC qABCD xA xB xC xD ; 2 where l is the performance result in each experiment.
Table 2 Factorial eects: average queue length A (n) 25.03% BD 3.18% B (minth) 5.84% CD 0.22% C (maxth) 6.37% ABC 0.02% D (pmax) 52.99% ABD 0.62%

where SST is called the Sum of Squares Total. As shown in Table 2, A (n) and D (pmax) are the largest two fractions, 25.03% and 52.99%, respectively. The interaction of A and D is also not ignorable. Number of ows and maximum dropping probability pmax of RED are the most important factors aecting the performance of average queue length. The similar phenomenon for the performance of queue length variation can be found in Table 3. If we want to control the queue length, measuring number of ows and tuning pmax are eective ways from the results of the factorial designs. If number of ows changes, tuning the parameter pmax of RED is the most powerful way to control variation of queue length. The authors in [10] have a similar observation from the game theory that the oblivious queue management schemes are highly sensitive to the increase in the number of ows. 4. NRED In this section, we propose a novel queue management scheme NRED, which employs an estimator to trace the amount of competing ows at the

AB 1.32% ACD 0.66%

AC 0.23% BCD 0.00%

AD 3.49% ABCD 0.00%

BC 0.02%

Table 3 Factorial eects: variation of queue length A (n) 40.9% BD 1.52% B (minth) 2.04% CD 2.07% C (maxth) 4.94% ABC 0.10% D (pmax) 12.76% ABD 4.10% AB 1.87% ACD 1.07% AC 5.56% BCD 0.00% AD 22.96% ABCD 0.13% BC 0.01%

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router and a queue length feedback control mechanism for ne tuning the parameters. 4.1. Estimation of number of ows The proposed method to estimate number of ows is motivated from Bloom lter [9]. Bloom lters are commonly used in word processing software applications as an ecient means to do spell-checking. When a packet arrives at the router, the source destination pair of the packet is hashed into a bin. A bin is a small cache and only needs 1 bit memory to mark 0 or 1. The estimator maintains P L bins. The bins are organized in L levels, each of which contains P bins. The scheme employs L independent hash functions, each of which is associated with one level of bins. Each hash function maps a ow into one of the P bins in that level. For an arrival packet, the L hash functions can perform in parallel simultaneously. At the beginning of measurement interval, all bins and a counter Nact are set to zero. When a packet arrives at the router, the L hashed bins for the sourcedestination IP address pair of the packet are set to 1 and Nact increases 1 if at least one of the L hashed bins is zero before hashing. If all of the values in the hashed bins are 1, Nact remains the same. Packets belonging to the same ow are mapped to the same bin in each of the L level. As shown in Fig. 2, packets of ow2 may be hashed into the same bin as the ow1 at some particular levels. However, they should be hashed into dierent bins at some other levels. It is possible for packets belonging to two dierent ows are hashed into the same bins of L levels, though the event is rare. We called this problem as misclassication. Basically, L levels with P bins in each level

can provide PL virtual buckets for only P L bins. For suitable selection of L and P, the probability of the misclassication will be very small. At the end of the measurement interval, all of the bins and Nact are set to 0. We call a set of P L bins as a table. When Nact and all of bins are set to 0 at the end of each measurement interval, Nact has to warm up each time to reach a stable value. One way to solve this problem is to use two tables with overlapping measurement intervals. 4.2. Queue management with number of ows estimator TCP behaviors were successfully developed by the uid model and the stochastic dierential equation [14,15]. Furthermore, simulation results [13] demonstrated that the models accurately captured the TCP behavior. Here, we use a simplied version and ignore the TCP timeout mechanism, which occurs rarely due to early congestion notication of RED queue management. The change in TCP window size could be presented by the additive increase at each round trip time and the multiplicative decrease due to RED dropping. This model is described as follows: _ t a bW t W t Rt pt Rt; 5 W R t Rt Rt W t _ t q N t C ; 6 R t _ t is the time where W(t) is the TCP window size; W dierential function of W(t); q(t) is the queue length; _ t is the time dierential function of q(t); R(t) is q t the round-trip time: qC T p ; C is the link capacity; Tp is the propagation delay; N(t) is the number of

H0

H1
H1 1

H L-2

H L-1
H0 1

0 Flow 1

.. . .. .

1
H0 1

0 H1 1

H0 1

. . .
1 H0 1
Flow 2
H0 1

. . .
H0 1

. . .

. . .
1
H1 1

.. . .. .

H0 1

Fig. 2. An example for estimating number of ows.

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TCP ows and p(t) is the dropping probability of packets. The constants a and b in Eq. (5) denote the additive increase and the multiplicative decrease (AIMD) [19] of TCP window, respectively. Eq. (6) models an accumulated dierence between packet arrival rate N(t)W(t)/R(t) and link capacity C for queue length at a bottleneck router. Since RED has to drop arrival packet early, we subtract a term p N(t)W(t)/R(t) to Eq. (6). Simultaneously, a and b are set to 1 and 2, respectively [19]. We rewrite the dierential equations as follows: _ t a bW t W t Rt pt Rt; W R t Rt Rt W t _ t q N t 1 pt C . R t 7 8

tation schemes, adjustment by estimation of number of active ows in the rst step and then ne-tuning by a queue length feedback control, an approximate setting for round trip time is acceptable. 4.3. Queue length feedback control In order to stabilize uctuation of queue length, we use a feedback control technology to improve our queue management scheme. DRED [8,20] uses a simple feedback control approach to randomly discard packets in the queue. The objective is to stabilize the queue size q(t) of the current time t at a pre-determined target queue length T, independent of network trac load, round trip time or sending rate. DRED samples the actual queue length to generate an error function e(t) = q(t) T. Then, it is used to adapt the dropping probability. NRED uses a novel feedback control mechanism dierent from DRED. When average queue length is monitored each time, an error signal could be produced. Assume that the target queue length T is set to (maxth + minth)/2. If the average queue length is controlled around the target queue length, the feedback control will operate at the point O. Consequently, we will get the dropping probability p0 corresponding the target queue length T, and pmax = 2p0. If the queue length of the RED gateway moves to a transient point, denoted A, the dropping probability moves from p0 to pA and the queue length qA is away from the target T, as shown in Fig. 3. To force the queue length from point A back to O, a new maximum dropping probability pmax is set to pmax new 2pA . 12

We can solve these equations by the small-signal method [13] at an operational point to nd the relation of a queue length q and a dropping probability p. we assume that the states are stable, i.e. W(t) = W, q(t) = q, N(t) = N, R(t) = q/C + Tp = R _ 0 and q _ 0 so that and p(t) = p, then W
2 _ t 0 1 W p ) W 2 p 2; W 9 R 2R W RC _ t 0 N 1 p C ) W . q R N 1 p

10 From Eqs. (9) and (10), and RED drop function, we get a formula for pmax, 8 s9 < R2 C 2 R2 C 2 R4 C 4 = pmax 2 1 ; 11 : 4N 2 2N 2 16N 4 ; where the queue length should be controlled within the range between the maximum threshold and minimum threshold. Basically, the mid-point is a good choice of the target queue length, q = (maxth + minth)/2. In the former sections, we have concluded that tuning pmax is an eective way to control the queue length. From Eq. (11), we can get an appropriate pmax according to an estimated number of ows. It is dicult to estimate the parameter of round trip time. Round trip time of each ow may be dierent due to heterogeneous environment. However, in our simulation study presented later in Section 5, queue length performance with round trip time at a xed value around the mean of all ows is acceptable. Since NRED employs two adap-

The current dropping probability pA and queue length qA have the following relationships:

P (drop)

pmax

po
minth

O T

A
maxth

AvgLen

Fig. 3. Drop probability function.

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pA

qA minth pmax old maxth minth q T p0 A pmax old p0 ; maxth T

13

mechanism is skipped, and the second mechanism persistently adjusts pmax according to the dierence between the current queue length and the target T. 5. Simulations In this section, we compare the simulation results of our proposed NRED with the existing queue management schemes, BLUE [2], REM [5], SRED [7], and DRED [8]. The estimator of number of ows used here employs two-level bins to avoid the misclassication of ows. Two sets of tables are used alternately to evade the warm-up phase of each set of tables and they have a 40-ms overlapping interval. The reset time of each table is 130 ms. The time period for queue length feedback is 1 ms except the simulation 1. All simulations are performed using ns-2.1b9a simulator [11]. In all of our simulations, we use the topology shown in Fig. 5. Sn and Dn denote the source and the destination of TCP ow n, respectively. R1 is the congested router with one of the queue management schemes. The parameters used for the simulations are presented in Table 4. Here, we set the target queue length at T = 1/2 (minth + maxth). The range of Y-axis of queue length versus time in all the following gures is from 0 to 250 packets. 5.1. Queue length feedback time and steady state The rst simulation 1 is to verify the queue length feedback time settings. The target queue length of each scheme is set to 107.5 packets. The congested link is shared by 100 TCP ows which start at time 0. The

where 1 p0 pmax old . 14 2 If we try to let the feedback control at the point O and the queue length xed at the point T, from Eqs. (12)(14), we can get the following iterative formula: 2pmax old pmax new pmax old maxth minth qt T . 15 Eq. (15) is used to control queue length around the target queue length. An error q(t) T at every sample time is calculated to adapt the parameter pmax to force the queue length back to the target T. As the queue length becomes larger, the algorithm drops arrival packets with a larger pmax. On the contrary, as the queue length becomes smaller, pmax decreases and RED drops arrival packets more mildly. By this feedback control, the queue length can be maintained in the vicinity around the target. Fig. 4 shows a block diagram for our proposed queue management with estimation of number of ows and queue length feedback control. The Nact estimation monitors ow number N and judges whether N changes or not. If it changes, a value pmax for the new network condition is calculated from Eq. (11). Then, the feedback control mechanism ne-grained tunes pmax to stabilize the queue length around the target T. If N does not change, the rst

p
Algorithm for Calculating p
Algorithm for tuning p
max

q, p
max

max

q
Nact
N changes?

RED Dropping Function

Yes No

q
Nact

Nact Estimation

Receivers

RED Gateway Arrival Packet Dropping

Sender
Acknowledgements

Fig. 4. Block diagram of NRED.

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S1 S2
Bottleneck Link

D1 D2
R1

R2

Sn
Fig. 5. Simulation topology.

Dn

Table 4 Simulation parameters C (pkt/s) 2500 minth (pkt/s) 45 maxth (pkt/s) 170 B (pkt/s) 250 RTT (ms) 60 T (pkt/s) 107.5

results in Table 5 show that the queue length feedback time could aect the performance of our scheme. Since the feedback is performed in the router, the feedback time could be set at a short time to improve the performance of NRED. Then, one experiment is to discuss the steady-state performance of NRED compared with the existing schemes when all TCP ows are persistent. As shown in Fig. 6(a) and (b), both BLUE and REM have poor performance on initial convergence when the TCP ows start. The two schemes have to spend a long time to reach its rst convergence. Especially, the uctuation of queue length in BLUE is large. The other three schemes, including NRED, SRED and DRED, have good initial convergence comparatively. In addition, those three schemes can hold queue length around the target. As shown in Fig. 6, the uctuation of the queue length in NRED is much smaller than that in the other four schemes. Since number of ows does not change in this experiment, only the queue length feedback control mechanism of NRED works. Basically, the control gain of DRED is xed at a constant a, while that of NRED is larger with larger error signal. Consequently, NRED has better control to force the queue length back to the vicinity of the target. Furthermore, the choice of a is hard to be decided in various network conditions [8]. In addition, even if
Table 5 Eects of queue length feedback time Feedback time (ms) Avg. queue length (pkts) Std. 1 97.429 37.120 5 110.725 47.298 10 122.123 62.851 Fig. 6. Queue length versus time for that 100 ows start at 0 s and stop at 100 s: (a) BLUE; (b) REM; (c) SRED; (d) DRED; (e) NRED.

the optimal value of a is found in a network environment, it will be no more optimal when the

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network environment changes. However, for the proposed feedback mechanism in NRED, the parameter pmax of RED is well adapted in varied network environments. If queue length becomes larger due to a larger error signal, the control gain is also tuned to be larger. Therefore, the eciency of our proposed feedback control in NRED is better than DRED with the best choice of control gain. 5.2. Flows crowd into the network In this subsection, we observe variation of queue length when a large number of ows crowd into the buer. Initially, the congested link is shared by 50 TCP ows. Then, at 15th second, 100 newcomer TCP ows crowd into the link and stay for a short period 120 ms. After the 100 short TCP ows leave, the 50 original ows still share the congested link and stop at the 20th second. In this scenario, we use the same parameter settings as the previous experiment. Since BLUE cannot eectively control the queue length, the graph of BLUE is omitted. As shown in Fig. 7, NRED works pretty well in this scenario. The impulse of the queue length at the 15th second is due to a lot of ows joining in the competition. NRED can throttle the queue length and the uctuation is the smallest among these schemes. The queue length of DRED is high during the disturbing pulse duration since DRED only uses a feedback control and does not employ any mechanism to detect the change of number of ows in the network. In addition, DRED has a xed control gain which is not able to dynamically adapt the parameter settings when network condition changes. 5.3. Number of ows varying with time We discuss three dierent scenarios in this subsection. Number of ows varies with time and changes in the 20th, 40th, 60th, and 80th second as shown in Figs. 810. As shown in Figs. 1113, REM performs very badly if lots of ows go in and out. In comparison, SRED, DRED, and NRED maintain a relatively stable queue length when lots of ows go in and out. However, NRED outperforms SRED and DRED. 5.4. Impact of dierent round-trip times Round trip time (RTT) is composed of queuing delay and propagation delay. Generally speaking,
Fig. 7. Queue length versus time for that 100 ows start at 15 s and persist for 120 ms: (a) REM; (b) SRED; (c) DRED; (d) NRED.

queuing delay is larger than propagation delay and propagation delay does not vary with time. Therefore, RTT is dominated by queuing delay. If queuing delay is held at a xed value, RTT is predictable. Here, we want to know if NRED performs still well if ows with dierent RTTs compete at the bottleneck router. 100 TCP ows with dierent RTTs, which are uniformly distributed between 60 and 100 ms, share a congested link. Then, we perform three sets of simulations: R in Eq. (11) is xed at

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Nact

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100 80 60 40 20 20 40 60 80 100

Time (sec)

Fig. 8. Number of ows in scenario I.

Nact

100 80 60 40 20 20 40 60 80 100

Time (sec)

Fig. 9. Number of ows in scenario II.

Nact

100 80 60 40 20 20 40 60 80 100

Time (sec)

Fig. 10. Number of ows in scenario III.

Fig. 11. Queue length versus time in scenario I: (a) REM; (b) SRED; (c) DRED; (d) NRED.

60, 100 ms, and the harmonic mean Rhar, respectively. As shown in Table 6, the average queue length of each simulation is around the target queue length, 107.5 packets, and standard deviation is low. The inaccurate R does not aect the performance of NRED too much. Fig. 14 shows the distribution of the queue length. We can see the queue size is controlled mainly in the region between 75 and 125 packets near the target. Inaccurate RTT settings do not aect our scheme largely. The second issue is the eect of ows with dierent RTTs joining in a stable queue. At the 15th second, ows with dierent RTTs crowd into a congested link. Table 7 represents the settings of these two scenarios. Figs. 15 and 16 show the queue length versus time when the ratio of RTT-match

and RTT-mismatch ows is 1:1 and 1:4, respectively. Although the uctuation at the 15th second is large, the queue length is still held around the target. Through this discuss of RTT issues, we can nd that RTT is not necessarily accurate for NRED. NRED scheme still performs well even with an inaccurate RTT. 5.5. Multiple congested links In this subsection, we want to study the performance of NRED deployed in a network with multiple congested links. The performance of end-to-end delay for ows passing through multiple congested links is of our concerns. RTT settings for NRED

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Fig. 12. Queue length versus time in scenario II: (a) REM; (b) SRED; (c) DRED; (d) NRED.

Fig. 13. Queue length versus time in scenario III: (a) REM; (b) SRED; (c) DRED; (d) NRED.

routers are dicult since it is hard to measure an accurate RTT value for a ow passing through multiple congested links. However, approximate RTT value is acceptable for the performance of NRED. 5.5.1. Case 1: Multiple NRED congested routers A network topology with multiple NRED congested routers is used to study the delay performance of ows. Each NRED router is congured as before, i.e. T = 107.5, R = 60 ms, . . . etc. As shown in Fig. 17, three ows from s1, s2 and s3 to r1, r2 and r3, respectively, pass through multiple congested routers. In addition, 100 TCP ows are persisted to contend with the three ows. The simulation time is 50 s. The delay of each user is shown in Fig. 18. The results show that each

congested NRED router could provide a low delay jitter for each ow. Consequently, ows passing multiple congested NRED routers have predictable delay performance. 5.5.2. Case 2: Park lot The other simulation which we want to study the performance of NRED routers in a more complicated network topology is shown in Fig. 19. Three groups of background ows are denoted
Table 6 Average queue length using dierent values of RTT RTT Avg. queue length (pkts) Std. 60 96.273 33.895 100 113.909 31.663 Rhar 108.253 28.564

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J.-S. Li, Y.-S. Su / Journal of Systems Architecture 52 (2006) 359372

TCP-1 ~ TCP-50 receiver r r TCP-51 ~ TCP-100 receiver r r

TCP-1 ~ TCP-100 source s R s

s1 s2

NRED1
s3

NRED2
r1 r2

r3

Fig. 17. Simulation topology in Case 1. Fig. 14. Histogram of queue length for 100 non-homogeneous ows.

Table 7 Two scenarios of simulation with inaccurate RTT Scenario Initial number of ows 50 20 Number of newcomer ows at the 15th second 50 80 Initial RTT (ms) RTT of newcomer ows (ms) 100 100

1:1 1:4

60 60

Fig. 15. Queue length (match:mismatch = 1:1).

versus

time

for

dierent

RTTs

Fig. 18. Delay time in Case 1: (a) source 1; (b) source 2; (c) source 3.

Fig. 16. Queue length (match:mismatch = 1:4).

versus

time

for

dierent

RTTs

TCP-1100, TCP-101200 and TCP201300, respectively. At the beginning, 10 ows of each group starts simultaneously. Each group increases number

of ows to 100 during the 2040th second, and returns to 10 during the 4060th second. In this simulation, the delay performance of the ow TCP-0 is of our concerns. The ow TCP-0 is persistent during the simulation. As shown in Fig. 20 and Table 8, NRED can provide a smoother delay curve and smaller delay standard deviation, when compared with SRED or DRED.

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TCP-1 ~100 TCP-101 ~200 TCP-201 ~ 300 receiver receiver receiver r r r r r r

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6. Conclusions In this paper, we examine the impact of factors on RED performance using 2k factorial designs. Among these systematic and environmental parameters, pmax and number of ows are found to be two dominant factors. Then, we propose a novel RED-based queue management scheme using estimation of number of ows and queue length feedback control, called NRED. NRED employs a fast estimator of number of ows motivated from Bloom lter. NRED can eciently control the queue length when a lot of ows suddenly crowd into the router. In addition, we use an ecient feedback control mechanism to hold the queue length to a pre-determined value. Through detailed simulations, NRED is shown to be an ecient and eective queue management scheme to throttle queue length at a target value under various network conditions. Furthermore, NRED works well even with inaccurate RTT values. Consequently, NRED is suitable to be deployed in todays Internet. Acknowledgement This research is supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China under Contract No. NSC92-2213-E-006-065. References
[1] E. Hash. Analysis of random drop for gateway congestion control, Report LCS TR-465. Laboratory for Computer Science, M.I.T., 1989. [2] W. Feng, D. Kandlur, D. Saha, K. Shin, Blue: a new class of queue management algorithms, U. Michigan CSE-TR-38799, April 1999. [3] S. Floyd, K. Fall, Router mechanisms to support end-to-end congestion control, Technical Report, LBL, 1997. Available from: <http://www3nrg.ee.lbl.gov/nrg-thesiss.html>. [4] S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance, IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 1 (4) (1993) 397413. [5] S.H. Low, S. Athuraliya, V.H. Li, Q. Yin, REM: active queue management, IEEE Network (2001). [6] S. Athuraliya, S.H. Low. Optimization ow control, II: random exponential marking, 2000. Available from: <http:// www.ee.mu.oz.au/sta/slow/research/>. [7] T.J. Ott, T.V. Lakshman, L.H. Wong, SRED: stabilized RED, in: Proc. IEEE INFOCOM99, NY, March 2125, 1999, pp. 13461355. [8] J. Aweya, M. Ouellette, D.Y. Montuno, A control theoretic approach to queue management, Comput. Networks J. 36 (23) (2001) 203235. [9] B. Bloom, Space/time trade-os in hash coding with allowable errors, Commun. ACM 13 (7) (1970).

TCP-0 source
s

NRED1
s
s

NRED2
s

NRED3 R
s

r TCP-0 receiver

TCP-1 ~ 100 TCP-101 ~200 TCP-201 ~300 source source source

Fig. 19. Simulation topology in Case 2.

Fig. 20. Delay time in Case 2: (a) SRED; (b) DRED; (c) NRED.

Table 8 Standard deviation of delay time Scheme SRED DRED NRED Std. 30.665 29.010 26.175

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J.-S. Li, Y.-S. Su / Journal of Systems Architecture 52 (2006) 359372 Jung-Shian Li joined National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in the spring of 1999 in the department of electrical engineering. Now, he is an associate professor in the same department. He graduated from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, with a B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering in 1990, and a M.Sc. in 1992. In 1998, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. He teaches communications courses and his research interests include QoS, network performance, and trac management. He is currently involved in funded research projects dealing with network security testbed, common criteria, intrusion prevention system, performance in router active queue management, and IP QoS architectures. He is the director of information and communication security research and development center, NCKU. He has authored or coauthored over 40 papers in technical journals and conference proceedings. He is a member of IEEE. Yong-Shun Su received the M.S. degrees in electronics engineering from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in 2003. He is now in the military service. He is engaged in the research and development of queue management, ow scheduling and QoS solution for IP-based networks.

[10] D. Dutta, A. Goel, J. Heidemann, Oblivious AQM and nash equilibrium, in: Proc. ACM Sigcomm 2002. [11] http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/. [12] R. Jain, The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Simulation, and Modeling, Wiley, pp. 275390. [13] V. Misra, W.B. Gong, D. Towsley, Fluid-based analysis of a network of queue management routers supporting TCP ows with an application to RED, in: Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2001. [14] V. Misra, W.B. Gong, D. Towsley, Stochastic dierential equation modeling and analysis of TCP windowsize behavior. Technical Report ECE-TR-CCS-99-10-01, 1999 Istanbul. Available from: <ftp://gaia.cs.umass.edu/pub/Misra99-TCPStochastic.ps.gz>. [15] J. Padhye, V. Firoiu, D. Towsley, J. Kurose, Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation, in: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, 1998. [16] J. Aweya, M. Ouellette, D.Y. Montuno, A load adaptive mechanism for buer management, Comput. Networks J. 36 (2001) 709728. [17] M. Christiansen, K. Jeay, D. Ott, F.D. Smith, Tuning RED for web trac, IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 9 (3) (2001). [18] http://www.aciri.org/oyd/REDparameters.txt. [19] R. Morris, Scalable TCP congestion control, in: Proc. IEEE INFOCOM 2000, pp. 11761183. [20] J. Aweya, M. Ouellette, D.Y. Montuno, A. Chapman, Enhancing TCP performance with a load-adaptive RED mechanism, Comput. Networks J. 11 (2001) 3150. [21] D. Lin, R. Morris, Dynamics of random early detection, in: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 1997, pp. 127137.