A Queue Policy for Multimedia Communications

To support UDP-based real-time multimedia applications over the Internet, it is necessary to provide a certain amount of bandwidth within the network so that the performance of the applications will not be seriously affected during periods of congestion. Since the flow rates of some of these applications do not back of during periods of congestion, it is also necessary to protect flow-controlled TCP flows from unresponsive or aggressive UDP flows. To achieve these goals, we propose a simple queue policy to support multimedia applications, called threshold-based queue management (TBQM). TBQM isolates UDP flows efficiently from TCP flows to protect TCP flows while supporting bandwidth requirements of UDP applications that require QoS. In addition, TBQM supports drop fairness between TCP flows without maintaining per-flow state. We also present some experimental results to show that the proposed queue policy can work well.