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 drop packets in random fashion. If routers provide a minimum QoS, resulting less delays, more fairness, and smoother 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, a per-flow exponential drop probability, and a dropping strategy that guarantees fairness when there are many flows. Moreover, we introduce a practical definition of active flows to reduce the overhead coming from maintaining per-flow states. We discuss how proposed scheme motivates real-time applications to adopt TFRC. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.