Improving explicit congestion notification with the mark-front strategy

Delivering congestion signals is essential to the performance of networks. Current TCP/IP networks use packet losses to signal congestion. Packet loss not only reduces TCP performance, but also adds large delay. Explicit congestion notification (ECN) delivers a faster indication of congestion and has better performance. However, current ECN implementations mark the packet from the tail of the queue. In this paper, we propose the mark-front strategy to send an even faster congestion signal. We show that mark-front strategy reduces buffer size requirement, improves link efficiency and provides better fairness among users. Simulation results that verify our analysis are also presented.