CoDel and PIE are recently proposed Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms that minimize the time packets spend enqueued at a bottleneck, instantiating shallow, 5 ms to 20 ms buffers with short-term packet burst tolerance. However, shallow buffering causes noticeable TCP performance degradation when a path’s underlying round trip time (RTT) heads above 60ms to 80ms (not uncommon with cross-continental and inter-continental traffic). Using less-aggressive multiplicative backoffs is known to compensate for shallow bottleneck buffering. We propose ABE: “Alternative Backoff with ECN”, which consists of enabling Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and letting individual TCP senders use a larger multiplica- tive decrease factor in reaction to ECN-marks from AQM- enabled bottlenecks. Using a mix of experiments, theory and simulations with standard NewReno and CUBIC flows, we show significant performance gains in lightly- multiplexed scenarios, without losing the delay-reduction benefits of deploying CoDel or PIE. ABE is a sender- side-only modification that can be deployed incrementally (requiring no flag-day) and offers a compelling reason to deploy and enable ECN across the Internet.

Unmanaged large buffers in today's networks have given rise to a slew of performance issues.  These performance issues can be addressed by some form of Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanism, optionally in combination with a packet scheduling scheme such as fair queuing. The IETF Active Queue Management and Packet Scheduling working group was formed to standardize AQM schemes that are robust, easily implementable, and successfully deployable in today's networks.  This document describes various criteria for performing precautionary characterizations of AQM proposals.  This document also helps in ascertaining whether any given AQM proposal should be taken up for standardization by the AQM WG.