Active Queue Management for TCP Friendly Rate Control traffic in heterogeneous networks

With the increasing number of media flows using UDP in IP networks there is a strong need to enable fairness between UDP and TCP traffic. The TCP traffic will suffer because of the unresponsiveness of UDP to congestion in the IP network. To enable responsiveness of UDP traffic, the TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol can be used. With the coexistence of TCP and UDP, where the rate adaptation of UDP is managed by the TFRC protocol, knowledge is needed about how active queue management (AQM) algorithms perform to optimize networks performance. This paper studies the behavior of several AQM algorithms when small packet UDP flows compete with TCP flows in a heterogeneous network. A simulation study is presented, showing the results of different AQM algorithms. It shows that the adaptive AQM (AAQM) is very promising with respect to responsiveness and robustness.