A fairness investigation on active queue management schemes in wireless local area network

Active Queue Management (AQM) is scheme to handle network congestion before it happened by deciding which packet has to be dropped, when to drop it, and through which port have to drop when it has become or is becoming congested. Furthermore, AQM schemes such as Random Early Detection (RED), Random Early Marking (REM), Adaptive Virtual Queue (AVQ), and Controlled Delay (CoDel) have been proposed to maintain fairness when unresponsive constant bit rate UDP flows share a bottleneck link with responsive TCP traffic. However, the performance of these fair AQM schemes need more investigation especially evaluation in WLANs environment. This paper provides an experimental evaluation of different AQM schemes in WLAN environment with presence of two different types of flows (TCP flows and UDP flows) to study the behavior of these AQM schemes which might punish some flows unfairly. The simulation method has conducted in this paper by using Network Simulation 2 (ns-2) with the topology of bottleneck scenario. The result has shown that REM and AVQ both obtain higher fairness value than RED and Codel. However, CoDel has given the lowest fairness comparing with RED scheme which have given a moderated value in terms of fairness in WLANs environment. Besides, AQM schemes must be chosen not only based on its performance or capability to indicate the congestion and recovering overflow situation but also considering fairness with different types of flows and the environment as well, such as WLANs environment