A Triplex Region - Random Early Detection (TR-RED) Algorithm for Active Queue Management in Internet Routers

Abstract

Internet traffic is growing at an explosive proportion due to ever-increasing innovations in technology. Consequently, the massive growth in the number of Internet users has also led to the problem of network congestion. When congestion occurs, the quality of network service can no longer be guaranteed. One of the widely-known active queue management (AQM) algorithms performed in Internet router is the Random Early Detection (RED). RED itself certainly has a deficiency of applying same linear drop function for varying network loads, resulting in poor quality of network service. This paper presents a new type of amendment to RED, named as Triplex Region - Random Early Detection (TR-RED) Algorithm, to cope with the mentioned shortcoming. In TR-RED, three dropping functions are implemented as an alternative to RED's one and only linear drop function. Differently from RED, the working principle for the proposed TR-RED aims at providing different drop action (that is to say quadratic, linear and exponential) for unique levels of congestion in the network. Moreover, using ns-3 network simulator, we conduct three simulation experiments to benchmark TR-RED with two known enhanced RED-based AQM algorithms under three distinctive scenarios. Simulation results clearly indicated that TR-RED is a promising algorithm which offers a surpassing and indeed remarkable performance gain in delay across all scenarios considered. Interestingly, to upgrade from original RED to the proposed TR-RED only involves simple implementation effort. This is because only little modification is needed in the dropping profile of RED's algorithm implementation.