Minimum Bandwidth Dropping: A Packet Dropping Mechanism for Multimedia Traffic in the Internet

Recently, several new packet dropping mechanisms have been proposed for the Internet routers to achieve fair bandwidth allocation among the adaptive TCP applications and the emerging constant bit rate (CBR) multimedia applications which do not adapt their traffic rates. However, these mechanisms lead to waste of router bandwidth which in turn reduces throughput of contending TCP applications, when the allocated bandwidth to a given CBR application is below the minimum bandwidth required for any meaningful communication. In this paper, we propose a packet dropping mechanism, which aims to reduce or eliminate bandwidth waste in the routers by dropping all incoming packets from a CBR application as long as the fair share is below the minimum bandwidth required for that application. By analyzing a reference network configuration, it is illustrated that the proposed mechanism can significantly improve TCP throughput by reducing or eliminating bandwidth waste in the routers due to transmission of meaningless packets from CBR applications.