Achieving per-flow weighted rate fairness in a core stateless network

Abstract

Corelite is a quality of service architecture that provides weighted max-min fairness for rate among flows in a network without maintaining any per-flow state in the core routers. There are three key mechanisms that work in concert to achieve the service model of Corelite: the introduction of markers in a packet flow by the edge routers to reflect the normalized rate of the flow; weighted fair marker feedback at the core routers upon incipient congestion detection; and linear increase/multiplicative decrease based rate adaptation of packet flows at the edge routers in response to marker feedback.