Fairness-Driven Queue Management: A Survey and Taxonomy

Abstract

Providing congestion control in the Internet, while ensuring fairness among a myriad of heterogeneous flows, is a challenging task. The conventional wisdom is to rely on end-user applications cooperatively deploying congestion control mechanisms to achieve high network utilization and some degree of fairness among flows. However, as the Internet has evolved to encompass all of society, such a cooperative behavior from end-user applications is not always granted. Applications may simply act selfishly to be more competitive through bandwidth abuse. Bandwidth starvation may also arise unintentionally depending on the nature of traffic sources. The ensuing impact can be severe fairness hazard and even congestion collapse. Router-based queue management schemes driven by fairness objectives, thus, become an inescapable necessity for fairly sharing network resources. Given a significant volume of literature relating to fairness-driven queue management schemes, there has remained a need for a broader and coherent survey. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive review of eminent fairness-driven queue management schemes from the inception of the concept and the preliminary work to the most recent work. We present a new taxonomy of categorizing fairness-driven queue management schemes. We discuss design approaches and key attributes of these schemes and provide their comparison and analysis. Based on the outcomes of this survey, we discuss a number of open issues and provide generic design guidelines and future directions for the research in this field.