Performance Analysis of Assured Forwarding

Abstract

One desirable characteristics of any resource allocation (or differentiation) mechanism is that if many aggregates, each with its own reservation, are merged with other aggregates of the same class, each aggregate should get its reserved bandwidth and a fair share of the excess bandwidth. In particular, the performance of an aggregate should not be adversely affected by other aggregates and their congestion sensitivity. TCP flo ws are congestion sensitive while UDP flo ws are congestion insensitive in the sense that TCP flo ws reduce their traffic if any packets are lost. The goal of this study is to see if TCP flo w aggregates will be punished for their good behavior in the presence of competing UDP flo w aggregates in the same assured forwarding class. We identify several factors that affect the performance in the mixed environments and quantify their effects using a full factorial design of experiment methodology.