Heterogeneous Congestion Control: Efficiency, Fairness and Design

When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals (e.g. packet loss, queueing delay, ECN marking etc.) share the same network, the current theory based on utility maximization fails to predict the network behavior. Unlike in a homogeneous network, the bandwidth allocation now depends on router parameters and flow arrival patterns. It can be non-unique, inefficient and unfair. This paper has two objectives. First, we demonstrate the intricate behaviors of a heterogeneous network through simulations and present a rigorous framework to help understand its equilibrium efficiency and fairness properties. By identifying an optimization problem associated with every equilibrium, we show that every equilibrium is Pareto efficient and provide an upper bound on efficiency loss due to pricing heterogeneity. On fairness, we show that intra-protocol fairness is still decided by a utility maximization problem while inter-protocol fairness is the part over which we don¿t have control. However it is shown that we can achieve any desirable inter-protocol fairness by properly choosing protocol parameters. Second, we propose a simple slow timescale source-based algorithm to decouple bandwidth allocation from router parameters and flow arrival patterns and prove its feasibility. The scheme needs only local information

Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Congestion Control: Optimality and Stability

When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals share the same network, the current theory based on utility maximization fails to predict the network behavior. The pricing signals can be different types of signals such as packet loss, queueing delay, etc, or different values of the same type of signal such as different ECN marking values based on the same actual link congestion level. Unlike in a homogeneous network, the bandwidth allocation now depends on router parameters and flow arrival patterns. It can be non-unique, suboptimal and unstable. In Tang et al. (“Equilibrium of heterogeneous congestion control: Existence and uniqueness,” IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 824–837, Aug. 2007), existence and uniqueness of equilibrium of heterogeneous protocols are investigated. This paper extends the study with two objectives: analyzing the optimality and stability of such networks and designing control schemes to improve those properties. First, we demonstrate the intricate behavior of a heterogeneous network through simulations and present a framework to help understand its equilibrium properties. Second, we propose a simple source-based algorithm to decouple bandwidth allocation from router parameters and flow arrival patterns by only updating a linear parameter in the sources’ algorithms on a slow timescale. It steers a network to the unique optimal equilibrium. The scheme can be deployed incrementally as the existing protocol needs no change and only new protocols need to adopt the slow timescale adaptation

RED behavior with different packet sizes

We consider the adaptation of random early detection (RED) as a buffer management algorithm for TCP traffic in Internet gateways where different maximum transfer units (MTUs) are used. We studied the two RED variants described in [4] and point out a weakness in both. The first variant where drop probability is independent from the packet size discriminates connections with smaller MTUs. The second variant results in a very high packet loss ratio (PLR), and as a consequence low goodput, for connections with higher MTUs. We show that fairness in terms of loss and goodput can be supplied through an appropriate setting of the RED algorithm.Comment: 13 pages, submitted to IEEE symposium on computer communications (ISCC2000

Network Coded TCP (CTCP) Performance over Satellite Networks

We show preliminary results for the performance of Network Coded TCP (CTCP) over large latency networks. While CTCP performs very well in networks with relatively short RTT, the slow-start mechanism currently employed does not adequately fill the available bandwidth when the RTT is large. Regardless, we show that CTCP still outperforms current TCP variants (i.e., Cubic TCP and Hybla TCP) for high packet loss rates (e.g., >2.5%). We then explore the possibility of a modified congestion control mechanism based off of H-TCP that opens the congestion window quickly to overcome the challenges of large latency networks. Preliminary results are provided that show the combination of network coding with an appropriate congestion control algorithm can provide gains on the order of 20 times that of existing TCP variants. Finally, we provide a discussion of the future work needed to increase CTCP's performance in these networks.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Accepted at SPACOMM 201

Agile-SD: A Linux-based TCP Congestion Control Algorithm for Supporting High-speed and Short-distance Networks

Recently, high-speed and short-distance networks are widely deployed and their necessity is rapidly increasing everyday. This type of networks is used in several network applications; such as Local Area Networks (LAN) and Data Center Networks (DCN). In LANs and DCNs, high-speed and short-distance networks are commonly deployed to connect between computing and storage elements in order to provide rapid services. Indeed, the overall performance of such networks is significantly influenced by the Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) which suffers from the problem of bandwidth under-utilization, especially if the applied buffer regime is very small. In this paper, a novel loss-based CCA tailored for high-speed and Short-Distance (SD) networks, namely Agile-SD, has been proposed. The main contribution of the proposed CCA is to implement the mechanism of agility factor. Further, intensive simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of Agile-SD compared to Compound and Cubic which are the default CCAs of the most commonly used operating systems. The results of the simulation experiments show that the proposed CCA outperforms the compared CCAs in terms of average throughput, loss ratio and fairness, especially when a small buffer is applied. Moreover, Agile-SD shows lower sensitivity to the buffer size change and packet error rate variation which increases its efficiency.Comment: 12 Page

SatERN: a PEP-less solution for satellite communications

In networks with very large delay like satellite IPbased networks, standard TCP is unable to correctly grab the available resources. To overcome this problem, Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEPs), which break the end-to-end connection and simulate a receiver close enough to the sender, can be placed before the links with large delay. Although splitting PEPs does not modify the transport protocol at the end nodes, they prevent the use of security protocols such as IPsec. In this paper, we propose solutions to replace the use of PEPs named SatERN. This proposal, based on Explicit Rate Notification (ERN) protocols over IP, does not split connections and is compliant with IP-in-IP tunneling solutions. Finally, we show that the SatERN solution achieves high satellite link utilization and fairness of the satellite traffic