Detection of AQM on Paths using Machine Learning Methods
For network administrators and researchers, this work provides a practical tool to infer router queuing policies from end-to-end measurements, enabling better network diagnostics without requiring router access.
This paper develops a machine learning algorithm that uses Round-Trip Time and Congestion Window data from a single network flow to classify whether a bottleneck router uses Active Queue Management (AQM) or drop-tail queuing. The method achieves high classification accuracy across diverse network topologies and configurations.
In this paper, we address the problem of determining whether a bottleneck router on a given network path is using an AQM or a drop-tail scheme. We assume that we are given a source-to-sink path of interest -along which a bottleneck router exists- and data regarding the Round-Trip Times (RTT) and Congestion Window (CWND) sizes with respect to this flow. We develop a reliable classification algorithm that solely uses RTT and CWND information pertaining to a single flow to classify the queuing scheme, Tail Drop or AQM, used by the bottleneck router. We evaluate our method and present results that demonstrate our algorithm's highly accurate classification ability across a wide array of complex network topologies and configurations.