Improving TCP performance with bufferless token bucket policing: A TCP friendly policer

Abstract

TCP's interaction with a token bucket policer has been widely studied. However, it still remains a challenge to design a policer which can optimize performance irrespective of the traffic type, load and level of aggregation being policed. In this paper we propose an improvement to the token bucket policer using a dynamic bucket size. Our novel scheme presents a specific and effective way to continuously adjust the token bucket size beneficial to TCP. It does so without any knowledge of the traffic profile. Extensive simulation experimentation show that our mechanism helps TCP achieve a goodput very close to the policed rate. It is also rather insensitive to various parameter settings as opposed to other approaches in literature.