Rainbow Fair Queueing: Fair Bandwidth Sharing Without Per-Flow State

Abstract—Fair bandwidth sharing at routers has several advantages, including protection of well-behaved flows and possible simplification of endto-end congestion control mechanisms. Traditional mechanisms to achieve fair sharing (e.g., Weighted Fair Queueing, Flow Random Early Discard) require per-flow state to determine which packets to drop under congestion, and therefore are complex to implement at the interior of a high-speed network. In recent work, Stoica et al. have proposed Core-Stateless Fair Queueing (CSFQ), a scheme to approximate fair bandwidth sharing without per-flow state in the interior routers. In this paper, we also achieve approximate fair sharing without per-flow state, however our mechanism differs from CSFQ. Specifically, we divide each flow into a set of layers, based on rate. The packets in a flow are marked at an edge router with a layer label (or “color”). A core router maintains a color threshold and drops layers whose color exceeds the threshol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Zhiruo Cao, Zheng Wang, Ellen W. Zegura
• Keywords: Communications, Fair Queueing, Fair Sharing, INFOCOM 2000, Per-flow State