NBP
Network Border Patrol
Célio Albuquerque and Tatsuya Suda. University of California, Irvine.
Brett J. Vickers. Rutgers University.

Internet Traffic Control

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 project, we propose and investigate a new congestion avoidance mechanism called Network Border Patrol (NBP). NBP is a core-stateless congestion avoidance mechanism which 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.

Publications

  • Célio Albuquerque, Tatsuya Suda and Brett Vickers, "Network Border Patrol", to appear at IEEE Infocom 2000, Tel Aviv, Israel, March 2000. [INFOCOM '2000]. Also available as UCI-ICS Technical Report 99-44, University of California, Irvine, USA, October 1999.
  • Célio Albuquerque, Tatsuya Suda and Brett Vickers, "Fair Queuing with Feedback-Based Policing: Promoting Fairness and Preventing Congestion Collapse in the Internet", UCI-ICS Technical Report 99-26, University of California, Irvine, USA, June 1999. [ICS-TR-99-26]