A new approach to ensure fairness over the internet

Congestion signaling is an essential issue for ensuring a high network performance. Explicit congestion notification (ECN) has been proved to provide a faster indication of congestion and thus improve the QoS of a TCP/IP network. In this paper, we present a new scheme for ECN named fair in-time marking (FIM), which employs a mechanism that as well as providing an indication of incipient congestion, assures a fair service to all the connections. To facilitate such services using FIM, we propose inclusion of some simple yet effective functionalities in the routers. This is important as the client base of the Internet is increasing rapidly and the demand for a reasonably fair service is getting stronger. Experiments show that FIM offers the best fairness, sometimes better by around 20% or more without affecting efficiency, compared with other proposed schemes for ECN.