The end-to-end nature of Internet congestion control is an important factor in its scalability and robustness. However, end-to-end congestion control algorithms alone are incapable of preventing the congestion collapse and unfair bandwidth allocations created by applications which are unresponsive to network congestion. In this paper, we propose and investigate a new congestion avoidance mechanism called Network Border Patrol (NBP). NBP relies on 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. The NBP mechanism is 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 fair queueing, NBP achieves approximately max-min fair bandwidth allocations for competing network flows.
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