Optimizing RED Control to Maximize Utility

Facing limited network resources such as bandwidth and processing capability, the Internet will have congestion from time to time. In this paper, we propose a scheme to maximize the total utility offered by the network to the end user during congested times. We believe the only way to achieve our goal is to make the scheme application-aware, that is, to take advanatage of the characteristics of the application. To make our scheme scalable, it is designed to be class-based. Traffic from applications with similar characteristics is classified into the same class. We adopted the RED queue management mechanism to adaptively control the traffic belonging to the same class. To achieve the optimal utility, the traffic belonging to different classes should be controlled differently. By adjusting link bandwidth assignments of different classes, the scheme can achieve the goal and adapt to the changes of dynamical incoming traffic. We use the control theoretical approach to analyze our scheme.