A multi-queue-based ECN marking strategy for multi-class QoS guarantee in programmable networks

Currently, network applications are experiencing explosive growth, and various types of network applications are showing a trend of varied demands for quality of network service. However, the existing Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) marking methods have not taken into account the diversified Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of network applications. This article introduces a multi-queue ECN marking strategy targeting multiple QoS guarantees. The strategy utilizes virtual queues and dynamic weighted round-robin scheduling to achieve traffic partitioning in a programmable data plane. It constructs a multi-queue, multi-class QoS queuing model based on the QoS requirements of different traffic and network conditions. The model is solved by real-time to obtain the ECN marking thresholds and round-robin weights for different queues, in order to achieve dynamic QoS requirements of different network applications. We implemented this strategy in Mininet and BMv2, and compared it with DCQCN, P4QCN, and TCN. The experimental results indicate that this policy demonstrates good performance in terms of queue length, RTT, and throughput, while also ensuring fairness between traffics. Results of the experiment indicate that the proposed approach is superior to DCQCN and P4QCN in the field of performance fluctuation and rapid feedback, and it exhibits notable advantages over TCN, and also ensures the fairness of traffic.