Enabling smart environments by avoiding TCP congestion through PINK: A no-drop AQM

摘要

This paper proposes PINK (Passive INverse feedbacK), a queue management algorithm designed to indirectly impose a certain resource allocation policy on defined sets of client hosts. PINK adds intelligence at intermediate nodes that connect client hosts to bottleneck links or to external networks in general, allowing these nodes to dynamically modify the TCP Acknowledgments (ACKs) segments passing through. This is made by setting TCP ACK advertised Receive Windows field (RCV.WNDs) to custom values, in order to enforce a specific bandwidth utilization upper bound. To compute new RCV.WND values, PINK needs only the number of active connections, the flows RTTs and the transmission channel bandwidth. It follows that PINK permits to impose a centralized bandwidth management without the cooperation of clients, which means that no modification or addition whatsoever to end hosts is needed with the goal of enabling a smart environment by simply configuring the access node. Furthermore, as demonstrated in this paper, our proposal does not constraints client hosts performance without purpose; on the contrary, PINK improves efficiency on multiplexed channels by exploiting channel throughput, maintaining a low queuing delay, and guaranteeing optimal flow fairness without forcing any packet drop.