Promoting effective service differentiation with Size-oriented Queue Management

As the heterogeneity of Internet traffic increases, the need to provide the necessary quality guarantees for a broad range of applications becomes more and more important. We propose an Active Queue Management scheme, namely Size-oriented Queue Management, which realizes service differentiation based on the Less Impact–Better Service principle. SQM manages to satisfy broadly the quality constraints of real-time applications, without compromising the performance of bulk data applications. Using packet size as criterion, we are able to distinguish time-sensitive flows and apply different dropping and scheduling policies to favor time-sensitive traffic. Our simulation results indicate that SQM manages to increase application satisfaction and augment the user-perceived quality.