A Lightweight Mechanism to Control Misbehaving Flows using AQM-based Aggregate Marking

In this paper we address the problem of con- taining misbehaving flows at congested routers, by decou- pling it from the more complex issue of fair bandwidth shar- ing. We propose a very lightweight scheme based on ag- gregate fair packet marking at the network edge followed by simple RIO queueing at the congested network core to control, and penalize misbehaving flows. We develop a new class of AQM-based fair, stateless, aggregate packet markers that mark misbehaving flows among an edge ag- gregate, which are then dropped preferentially at a RIO- enabled router during congestion. We show, through exten- sive packet level simulations and an informal game theory analysis, that even with such a simple and stateless scheme, we can effectively penalize and control misbehaving flows at congested routers, and provide much better performance to best-effort TCP flows. Since our markers are stateless and operate on edge aggregates, and we do not introduce any complicated AQM algorithm at the network core, our scheme is extremely easy to deploy. This motivates the following important research question: Can we design a lightweight, stateless, edge-marking based architecture that can provide global fairness among different flows from dif- ferent edge-domains without making significant modifica- tions to the core routers?