'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
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
