A performance study of explicit congestion notification (ECN) with heterogeneous TCP flows

Abstract

This paper compares the simulated performance of RED routers and ECN routers. The results show that ECN provides better goodput and fairness than RED for heterogeneous TCP flows. When demand is held constant, increasing the number of flows generating the demand has a negative effect on performance. ns-2 simulations with many flows demonstrate that the bottleneck router's marking probability must be aggressively increased to provide good ECN performance. These experiments suggest that an adaptive version ofECN should provide better performance than ECN.