Abstract

Making drop decisions to enforce the max-min fair resource allocation in a network of standard TCP flows without any explicit state information is a challenging problem. Here we propose a solution to this problem by developing a suite of stateless queue management schemes that we refer to as Multi-Level Comparison with index l (MLC(l)). We show analytically, using a Markov chain model, that for an arbitrary network topology of standard TCP flows and queues employing MLC(l), the resource allocation converges to max-min fair as l increases. The analytical findings are verified experimentally using packet level ns2 simulations.