Paper Review: Paper Review: Analysis and Design of an Adaptive Virtual Queue (AVQ) Algorithm for Active Queue Management

Reviewer: Mark Meras (mm446)

Main Contribution

Key Ideas

• Many schemes to manage congestion fairly have been proposed. Many of these involve direct or indirect feedback to a preceding router when the incoming rate or flow bandwidth exceeds some threshold
• Schemes such as RED drop packets as feedback. Schemes such as ECN mark packets explicitly and have feedback sent to source. These Active Queue Management schemes have various advantages. Virtual queue schemes that have a lower capacity than a physical queue have been proposed. This paper focuses on adapting the capacity of the virtual queue based on the incoming rate and the previous data to maintain stability.
• The utility of each flow is taken into account in a fluid-model representation of the problem. The parameters to tune this representation are easily found.

  Critique of Contribution

  This appears to be a very useful contribution in the field of AQM. Adaptive response to a virtual queue is shown to create quite a bit of improvement in overall throughput, especially with many smaller-bandwidth flows.

  Open Question

  Can several virtual queues be used per router, with different parameters? Then, a packet can be put into one of the queues based on some criterion. This may be useful for packet prioritization on the router.