Telecommun Syst DOI 10.1007/s11235-017-0306-3 A stateless fairness-driven active queue management scheme for efficient and fair bandwidth allocation in congested Internet routers Ghulam Abbas 1 · Sanaullah Manzoor 2 · Masroor Hussain 1 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Fair bandwidth sharing is important for the Inter- net architecture to be more accommodative of the hetero- geneity. The Internet relies primarily on the end-systems to cooperatively deploy congestion control mechanisms for achieving high network utilization and some degree of fair- ness among flows. However, the cooperative behavior may be abandoned by some end-systems that act selfishly to be more competitive through bandwidth abuse. The result can be severe unfairness and even congestion collapse. Fairness- driven active queue management, thus, becomes essential for allocating the shared bottleneck bandwidth fairly among competing flows. This paper proposes a novel stateless active queue management algorithm, termed CHOKeH, to enforce fairness in bottleneck routers. CHOKeH splits the queue into dynamic regions at each packet arrival and treats each region differently for performing matched-drops using a dynamically updated drawing factor, which is based on the level of queue occupancy and the buffer size. In this way, CHOKeH can effectively identify and restrict unfair flows from dominating the bandwidth by discarding more packets from these flows. The performance of CHOKeH is studied through extensive simulations. The results demonstrate that B Ghulam Abbas abbasg@giki.edu.pk http://www.giki.edu.pk/abbas Sanaullah Manzoor sanaullah.manzoor@itu.edu.pk Masroor Hussain hussain@giki.edu.pk 1 Faculty of Computer Sciences and Engineering, GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Topi 23640, Pakistan 2 Faculty of Computer Science, Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan CHOKeH is well suited for fair bandwidth allocation even in the presence of multiple unresponsive flows and across a wider range of buffer sizes. The results also show the abil- ity of CHOKeH to provide inter-protocol and intra-protocols fairness and protection for short-lived flows. With a low per-packet-processing complexity, CHOKeH is amenable to implementation in core routers to offer an effective incen- tive structure for end-systems to self-impose some form of congestion control. Keywords Active queue management · Congestion control · Fairness · Unresponsive flows 1 Introduction There are two main objectives of the end-to-end conges- tion control. The first is to avoid or to mitigate the network congestion, and the second is to maintain some degree of fairness by sharing the bottleneck resources equally among competing flows [1, 2]. The first objective is essential for achieving efficient network utilization, while the second objective is important for the network to be more accom- modating of the heterogeneity and, thus, be widely accepted. Fairness becomes indispensable in the best-effort Internet where end-systems have to compete for their share due to the lack of quantitative service guarantees [3–7]. The performance and stability of the Internet relies mainly on the end-systems cooperatively deploying congestion control mechanisms in the transport layer protocols to realize high network utilization and to fairly share network resources [3, 8, 9]. The most widely used transport protocol today is TCP, which can adjust its load to whatever bandwidth the network provides. This cooperative behavior allows similarly situated 123