TCP-friendly system and method for marking scalable better best-effort services on the internet

摘要

A system and method for network-based packet marking, in conjunction with regular active queue management and packet dropping to scale the performance of buffer management for best-effort and differentiated services on the Internet. The present invention extends the notion of "TCP-Friendly" packet marking to improve the performance of traditional best-effort services. The TCP-aware use of deterministic packet marking at the enterprise edge allows the protection of selected TCP packets from suffering loss, thus dramatically reducing the total number of timeouts and avoiding the resulting service degradation. TCP sessions are protected with very small windows, disperse packet loss across a given window, and protect retransmitted packets from encountering loss. The present method and system use a comprehensive set of metrics to measure "better" best-effort service.