Interaction or interference: can AQM and low priority congestion control successfully collaborate?

Abstract

Heterogeneity in the Internet ecosystem sometimes turns interaction into interference. Over the years, active queue management (AQM) and end-to-end low-priority congestion control (LPCC) have been proposed as alternative solutions to counter the persistently full buffer problem -- that recently became popular under the "bufferbloat" term. In this work, we point out the existence of a negative interplay among AQM and LPCC techniques. Intuitively, as AQM is designed to penalize the most aggressive flows it mainly hit best effort TCP: it follows that LPCC is not able to maintain its low priority, thus becoming as aggressive as TCP. By an extended set of simulation on various AQM policies and LPCC protocols, including the very recent CoDel AQM and LEDBAT LPCC proposals, we point out that this interference is quite universal and deserves further attention.