As the speed and the dynamic range of computer networks evolve, the issue of efficient traffic management becomes increasingly important. This work describes an approach to traffic management using explicit rate information provided to the source by the network. We present an asynchronous distributed algorithm for optimal rate calculation across the network, where optimality is understood in the maxmin sense. The algorithm quickly converges to the optimal rates and is shown to be well-behaved in transience.
An explicit rate indication scheme for congestion avoidance in computer and telecommunication networks is proposed. The sources monitor their load and provide the information periodically to the switches. The switches, in turn, compute the load level and ask the sources to adjust their rates up or down. The scheme achieves high link utilization, fair allocation of rates among contending sources and provides quick convergence. A backward congestion notification option is also provided. The conditions under which this option is useful are indicated.
The OSU scheme is a rate-based congestion avoidance scheme for ATM networks using explicit rate indication. This work was one of the first attempts to define explicit rate switch mechanisms and the Resource Management (RM) cell format in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. The key features of the scheme include explicit rate feedback, congestion avoidance, fair operation while maintaining high utilization, use of input rate as a congestion metric, O(1) complexity. This paper presents an overview of the scheme, presents those features of the scheme that have now become common features of…
During overload, most networks drop packets due to buffer unavailability. The resulting timeouts at the source provide an implicit mechanism to convey congestion signals from the network to the source. On a timeout, a source should not only retransmit the lost packet, but it should also reduce its load on the network. Based on this realization, we have developed a simple congestion control scheme using the acknowledgment timeouts as indications of packet loss and congestion. This scheme does not require any new message formats, therefore, it can be used in any network with window flow control,…
TCPTuner is a TCP (transmission control protocol) congestion control kernel module and GUI (graphical user interface) for Linux that allows real-time modification of the congestion control parameters of TCP CUBIC, the current default algorithm in Linux. Specifically, the tool provides access to alpha, the rate at which a sender's congestion window grows; beta, the multiplicative factor to decrease the congestion window on a loss event; as well as CUBIC's fast convergence and tcp friendliness parameters. Additionally, the interface provides access to ip-route parameters for the minimum retransm…
Congestion control and avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a subject that has attracted a lot of research attention in the last decade. Besides rate and resource control, the utilization of mobile nodes has also been suggested as a way to control congestion. In this work, we present a Mobile Congestion Control (MobileCC) algorithm with two variations, to assist existing congestion control algorithms in facing congestion in WSNs. The first variation employs mobile nodes that create locally-significant alternative paths leading to the sink. The second variation employs mobile nodes t…
Congestion on the roads is a key problem to deal with, which wastes valuable time.. Due to high mobility rate and relative speed link failure occur very often. VANET is used to tackle the problem of congestion, and make decisions well in advance to avoid traffic congestion. In this paper we proposed a solution to detect and control the traffic congestion by using of both (V2V) and (V2I), as a result the drivers become aware of the location of congestion as well as way to avoid getting stuck in congestion. The congestion is detected by analyzing the data obtained by vehicular communication and …
Recently, a negative interplay has been shown to arise when scheduling/AQM techniques and low-priority congestion control protocols are used together: namely, AQM resets the relative level of priority among congestion control protocols. This work explores this issue by (i) studying a fluid model that describes system dynamics of heterogeneous congestion control protocols competing on a bottleneck link governed by AQM and (ii) proposing a system level solution able to reinstate priorities among protocols.
Applications running in geographically distributed setting are becoming prevalent. Large-scale online services often share or replicate their data into multiple data centers (DCs) in different geographic regions. Driven by the data communication need of these applications, inter-datacenter network (IDN) is getting increasingly important. However, we find congestion control for inter-datacenter networks quite challenging. Firstly, the inter-datacenter communication involves both data center networks (DCNs) and wide-area networks (WANs) connecting multiple data centers. Such a network environmen…
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries most of the traffic on the Internet these days. There are several implementations of TCP, and the most important difference among them is their mechanism for controlling congestion. One of the methods for determining type of a TCP is active probing. Active probing considers a TCP implementation as a black box, sends different streams of data to the appropriate host. According to the response received from the host, it figures out the type of TCP version implemented. TCP Behavior Inference Tool (TBIT) is an implemented tool that uses active probing to…
We introduce a model of the Relentless Congestion Control proposed by Matt Mathis. Relentless Congestion Control (RCC) is a modification of the AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease) congestion control which consists in decreasing the TCP congestion window by the number of lost segments instead of halving it. Despite some on-going discussions at the ICCRG IRTF-group, this congestion control has, to the best of our knowledge, never been modeled. In this paper, we provide an analytical model of this novel congestion control and propose an implementation of RCC for the commonly-used net…
In mobile adhoc networks, congestion occurs with limited resources. The standard TCP congestion control mechanism is not able to handle the special properties of a shared wireless channel. TCP congestion control works very well on the Internet. But mobile adhoc networks exhibit some unique properties that greatly affect the design of appropriate protocols and protocol stacks in general, and of congestion control mechanism in particular. As it turned out, the vastly differing environment in a mobile adhoc network is highly problematic for standard TCP. Many approaches have been proposed to over…
Existing transport protocols, be it TCP, SCTP or DCCP, do not provide an efficient congestion control mechanism for heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks. Solutions involving implicit loss discrimination schemes have been proposed but were never implemented. Appropriate mechanisms can dramatically improve bandwidth usage over the Internet, especially for multimedia transport based on partial reliability. In this paper we have implemented and evaluated a congestion control mechanism that implicitly discriminates congestion and wireless losses in the datagram congestion control protocol (DCC…
The choice of feedback mechanism between delay and packet loss has long been a point of contention in TCP congestion control. This has partly been resolved, as it has become increasingly evident that delay based methods are needed to facilitate modern interactive web applications. However, what has not been resolved is what control should be used, with the two candidates being the congestion window and the pacing rate. BBR is a new delay based congestion control algorithm that uses a pacing rate as its primary control and the congestion window as a secondary control. We propose that a congesti…
Congestion control algorithms are crucial in achieving high utilization while preventing overloading the network. Over the years, many different congestion control algorithms have been developed, each trying to improve in specific situations. However, their interactions and co-existence has, to date, not been thoroughly evaluated, which is the focus of this paper. Through head-to-head comparisons of representatives from loss-based, delay-based and hybrid types of congestion control algorithms, we reveal that fairness in resources claimed is often not attained, especially when flows sharing a l…
One of the main criteria in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) that has attracted the researchers' consideration is congestion control. Accordingly, many algorithms have been proposed to alleviate the congestion problem, although it is hard to find an appropriate algorithm for applications and safety messages among them. Safety messages encompass beacons and event-driven messages. Delay and reliability are essential requirements for event-driven messages. In crowded networks where beacon messages are broadcasted at a high number of frequencies by many vehicles, the Control Channel (CCH), which…
Weaknesses in several recently proposed ideas about congestion control and avoidance in high-speed netwroks are identified. Both sides of the debate concerning prior reservation of resources versus walk-in service, open-loop control versus feedback control, rate control versus window control, and router-based control versus source-based control are presented. The circumstances under which backpressure is useful or not are discussed, and it is argued that a single congestion scheme is not sufficient, but that a combination of several schemes is required for complete congestion management in a n…
The dynamic nature of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) induced by frequent topology changes and node mobility, imposes critical challenges for vehicular communications. Aggravated by the high volume of information dissemination among vehicles over limited bandwidth, the topological dynamics of VANET causes congestion in the communication channel, which is the primary cause of problems such as message drop, delay, and degraded quality of service. To mitigate these problems, congestion detection, and control techniques are needed to be incorporated in a vehicular network. Congestion control appr…
Popular myths that cheaper memory, high-speed links and high-speed processors will solve the problem of congestion in computer networks are shown to be false. A simple definition for congestion based on supply and demand of resources is proposed and is then used to classify various congestion schemes. The issues that make the congestion problem a difficult one are discussed, and then the architectural decisions that affect the design of a congestion scheme are presented. It is argued that long-, medium- and short-term congestion problems require different solutions. Some of the recent schemes …
We present and investigate a novel and timely application domain for deep reinforcement learning (RL): Internet congestion control. Congestion control is the core networking task of modulating traffic sources' data-transmission rates to efficiently utilize network capacity, and is the subject of extensive attention in light of the advent of Internet services such as live video, virtual reality, Internet-of-Things, and more. We show that casting congestion control as RL enables training deep network policies that capture intricate patterns in data traffic and network conditions, and leverage th…
Although delay-based congestion control protocols such as FAST promise to deliver better performance than traditional TCP Reno, they have not yet been widely incorporated to the Internet. Several factors have contributed to their lack of deployment. Probably, the main contributing factor is that they are not able to compete fairly against loss-based congestion control protocols. In fact, the transmission rate in equilibrium of delay-based approaches is always less than their fair share when they share the network with traditional TCP-Reno derivatives, that employ packet losses as their congest…
Currently, Ethernet is broadly used in LAN, datacenter and enterprise networks, storage networks, high performance computing networks and so on. Along with the popularity of Ethernet comes the requirement of enhancing Ethernet with congestion control. On the other hand, Ethernet speed extends to 40Gbps and 100Gbps recently, and even 400Gbps in the near future. The ultra-high speed requires congestion control algorithms to adapt to the broad changes of bandwidth, and highlights the impacts of small delay by enlarging the bandwidth delay product. The state-of-art standard QCN is heuristically de…
In a dense Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation, using a centralized algorithm for minimum-delay routing would incur significant signaling and computational overhead. In this work, we exploit the deterministic topology of the constellation to calculate the minimum-delay path between any two nodes in a satellite network. We propose a distributed probabilistic congestion control scheme to minimize end-to-end delay, which is built on top of the existing Datagram Routing Algorithm (DRA). The decision to route packets is taken based on the latest traffic information received from neighbour…
Congestions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) could potentially cause packet loss, throughput impairment and energy waste. To address this issue, a hop-by-hop cross-layer congestion control scheme (HCCC) built on contention-based MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. According to MAC-layer channel information including buffer occupancy ratio and congestion degree of local node, HCCC dynamically adjusts channel access priority in MAC layer and data transmission rate of the node to tackle the problem of congestion. Simulations have been conducted to compare HCCC against closely-related existi…
This paper focuses on Hopf bifurcation control in a dual model of Internet congestion control algorithms which is modeled as a delay differential equation (DDE). By choosing communication delay as a bifurcation parameter, it has been demonstrated that the system loses stability and a Hopf bifurcation occurs when communication delay passes through a critical value. Therefore, a time-delayed feedback control method is applied to the system for delaying the onset of undesirable Hopf bifurcation. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations confirm that the delayed feedback controller is efficie…
Delay-based congestion control algorithms provide higher throughput and stability than traditional loss-based AIMD algorithms, but they are inherently unfair against older connections when the queuing and the propagation delay cannot be measured accurately and independently. This paper presents a novel measurement algorithm whereby fairness between old and new connections is preserved. The algorithm does not modify the dynamics of congestion control, and runs entirely in the server host using locally available information.
Congestion is said to occur in the network when the resource demands exceed the capacity and packets are lost due to too much queuing in the network. During congestion, the network throughput may drop to zero and the path delay may become very high. A congestion control scheme helps the network to recover from the congestion state. A congestion avoidance scheme allows a network to operate in the region of low delay and high throughput. Such schemes prevent a network from entering the congested state. Congestion avoidance is a prevention mechanism while congestion control is a recovery mechanis…
To develop low latency congestion control algorithm for real time taffic has been gained attention recently. RTP Media Congestion Avoidance Techniques (RMCAT) working group was initiated for standard defination. There are three algorithms under this group, Network Assisted Dynamic Adaptation (NADA) proposed by Cisco, Google Congestion Control (GCC) proposed by Google and Self-Clocked Rate Adaptation for Multimedia(SCReAM) proposed by Ericsson. This paper compares and analyses the performance of these algorithms on simulation environment. Results show GCC has well fairness property and performs…
It is by now well-known that wireless networks with file arrivals and departures are stable if one uses alpha-fair congestion control and back-pressure based scheduling and routing. In this paper, we examine whether ?alpha-fair congestion control is necessary for flow-level stability. We show that stability can be ensured even with very simple congestion control mechanisms, such as a fixed window size scheme which limits the maximum number of packets that are allowed into the ingress queue of a flow. A key ingredient of our result is the use of the difference between the logarithms of queue le…
Satellite communication systems are the means of realizing a global broadband integrated services digital network. Due to the statistical nature of the integrated services traffic, the resulting rate fluctuations and burstiness render congestion control a complicated, yet indispensable function. The long propagation delay of the earth-satellite link further imposes severe demands and constraints on the congestion control schemes, as well as the media access control techniques and retransmission protocols that can be employed in a satellite network. The problems in designing satellite network p…
It is increasingly difficult for Internet congestion control mechanisms to obtain the feedback that they need. This lack of feedback can have severe performance implications, and it is bound to become worse. In the long run, the problem may only be fixable by fundamentally changing the way congestion control is done in the Internet. We substantiate this claim by looking at the evolution of the Internet's infrastructure over the past thirty years, and by examining the most common behavior of Internet traffic. Considering the goals that congestion control mechanisms are intended to address, and …
Modern networks exhibit a high degree of variability in link rates. Cellular network bandwidth inherently varies with receiver motion and orientation, while class-based packet scheduling in datacenter and service provider networks induces high variability in available capacity for network tenants. Recent work has proposed numerous congestion control protocols to cope with this variability, offering different tradeoffs between link utilization and queuing delay. In this paper, we develop a formal model of congestion control over time-varying links, and we use this model to derive a bound on the…
The IEEE 802.11p is the technology dedicated to vehicular communications to support road safety, efficiency, and comfort applications. A large number of research activities have been carried out to study the characteristics of the IEEE 802.11p. The key weakness of the IEEE 802.11p is the channel congestion issue, where the wireless channel gets saturated when the road density increases. The European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI) is in the progress of studying the channel congestion problem and proposed so-called Reactive Distributed Congestion Control (DCC) algorithm as a…
Recently, much effort has been devoted by researchers from both academia and industry to develop novel congestion control methods. LearningCC is presented in this letter, in which the congestion control problem is solved by reinforce learning approach. Instead of adjusting the congestion window with fixed policy, there are serval options for an endpoint to choose. To predict the best option is a hard task. Each option is mapped as an arm of a bandit machine. The endpoint can learn to determine the optimal choice through trial and error method. Experiments are performed on ns3 platform to verif…
Identifying the occurrence of congestion in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a major task. The inbuilt congestion control techniques of existing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) designed for wired networks do not handle the unique properties of shared wireless multi-hop link. There are several approaches proposed for detecting and overcoming the congestion in the mobile ad-hoc network. In this paper we present a Modified AD-hoc Transmission Control Protocol (M-ADTCP) method where the receiver detects the probable current network status and transmits this information to the sender as feedb…
Filtering packet traffic and rules of permit/denial of data packets into network nodes are granted by facilitating Access Control Lists (ACL). This paper proposes a procedure of adding a link load threshold value to the access control list rules option, which acts on the basis of threshold value. The ultimate goal of this enhanced ACL is to avoid congestion in targeted subnetworks. The link load threshold value allows to decide that packet traffic is rerouted by the router to avoid congestion, or packet drop happens on the basis of packet priorities. The packet rerouting in case of high traffi…
Congestion in network occurs due to exceed in aggregate demand as compared to the accessible capacity of the resources. Network congestion will increase as network speed increases and new effective congestion control methods are needed, especially to handle bursty traffic of todays very high speed networks. Since late 90s numerous schemes i.e. [1]...[10] etc. have been proposed. This paper concentrates on comparative study of the different congestion control schemes based on some key performance metrics. An effort has been made to judge the performance of Maximum Entropy (ME) based solution fo…
MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) is a promising protocol which brings new light to the TCP/IP protocol stack ossification problem by means of an impactful innovation of the transport layer. A MPTCP connection consists of a set of one or more subflows, where each subflow offers an alternative path to reach a target remote end-system. However, simply applying the standard TCP congestion control on each subflow would give an unfair resource sharing. Various subflows of a connection would dispute bottleneck links with regular single-path TCP connections, leading them to starvation conditions. To deal with th…
Congestion control mechanisms for ATM networks as selected by the ATM Forum traffic management group are described. Reasons behind these selections are explained. In particular, selection criteria for selection between rate-based and credit-based approach and the key points of the debate between the two approaches are presented. The approach that was finally selected and several other schemes that were considered are described.
The goal of congestion control is to avoid congestion in network elements. A network element is congested if it is being offered more traffic than it can process. To detect such situations and to neutralize them we should monitor traffic in the network. In this paper, we propose using Cisco's NetFlow technology, which allows collecting statistics about traffic in the network by generating special NetFlow packets. Cisco's routers can send NetFlow packets to a special node, so we can collect these packets, analyze its content and detect network congestion. We use Cisco's feature as example, some…
Recent model-based congestion control algorithms such as BBR use repeated measurements at the endpoint to build a model of the network connection and use it to achieve optimal throughput with low queuing delay. Conversely, applying this model-based approach to Active Queue Management (AQM) has so far received less attention. We propose the new AQM scheduler cocoa based on fair queuing, which adapts the buffer size depending on the needs of each flow without requiring active participation from the endpoint. We implement this scheduler for the Linux kernel and show that it interacts well with th…
We consider the problem of designing a packet-level congestion control and scheduling policy for datacenter networks. Current datacenter networks primarily inherit the principles that went into the design of Internet, where congestion control and scheduling are distributed. While distributed architecture provides robustness, it suffers in terms of performance. Unlike Internet, data center is fundamentally a "controlled" environment. This raises the possibility of designing a centralized architecture to achieve better performance. Recent solutions such as Fastpass and Flowtune have provided the…
TCP and its variants have suffered from surprisingly poor performance for decades. We argue the TCP family has little hope to achieve consistent high performance due to a fundamental architectural deficiency: hardwiring packet-level events to control responses without understanding the real performance result of its actions. We propose Performance-oriented Congestion Control (PCC), a new congestion control architecture in which each sender continuously observes the connection between its actions and empirically experienced performance, enabling it to consistently adopt actions that result in h…
Low delay is an explicit requirement for applications such as cloud gaming and video conferencing. Delay-based congestion control can achieve the same throughput but significantly smaller delay than loss-based one and is thus ideal for these applications. However, when a delay- and a loss-based flow compete for a bottleneck, the loss-based one can monopolize all the bandwidth and starve the delay-based one. Fair queuing at the bottleneck link solves this problem by assigning an equal share of the available bandwidth to each flow. However, so far no end host based algorithm to detect fair queui…
Today, considerable Internet traffic is sent from the datacenter and heads for users. The characteristics of connections served by servers in datacenters are usually diverse and varied over time, with continuous upgrades in network infrastructure and user devices. As a result, a specific congestion control algorithm hardly accommodates the heterogeneity and performs well in various scenarios. In this work, we present Micro Congestion Control (MCC) --- a novel framework for Internet congestion control. With MCC, diverse algorithms can be assigned purposely to connections in one server to adapt …
Based on the principle of onion routing, the Tor network achieves anonymity for its users by relaying user data over a series of intermediate relays. This approach makes congestion control in the network a challenging task. As of today, this results in higher latencies due to considerable backlog as well as unfair data rate allocation. In this paper, we present a concept study of PredicTor, a novel approach to congestion control that tackles clogged overlay networks. Unlike traditional approaches, it is built upon the idea of distributed model predictive control, a recent advancement from the …
How to implement an impeccable space system-of-systems (SoS) internetworking architecture has been a significant issue in system engineering for years. Reliable data transmission is considered one of the most important technologies of space SoS internetworking systems. Due to the high bit error rate (BER), long time delay and asymmetrical channel in the space communication environment, the congestion control mechanism of classic transport control protocols (TCP) shows unsatisfying performances. With the help of existing TCP modifications, this paper contributes an aggressive congestion control…
Wireless sensor networks hold a great potential in the deployment of several applications of a paramount importance in our daily life. Video sensors are able to improve a number of these applications where new approaches adapted to both wireless sensor networks and video transport specific characteristics are required. The aim of this work is to provide the necessary bandwidth and to alleviate the congestion problem to video streaming. In this paper, we investigate various load repartition strategies for congestion control mechanism on top of a multipath routing feature. Simulations are perfor…
Congestion control has been an open research issue for more than two decades. More and more applications with narrow latency requirements are emerging which are not well addressed by existing proposals. In this paper we present TCP Scalable Increase Adaptive Decrease (SIAD), a new congestion control scheme supporting both high speed and low latency. More precisely, our algorithm aims to provide high utilization under various networking conditions, and therefore would allow operators to configure small buffers for low latency support. To provide full scalability with high speed networks, we des…
In Future Internet it is possible to change elements of congestion control in order to eliminate jitter and batch loss caused by the current control mechanisms based on packet loss events. We investigate the fundamental problem of adjusting sending rates to achieve optimal utilization of highly variable bandwidth of a network path using accurate packet rate information. This is done by continuously controlling the sending rate with a function of the measured packet rate at the receiver. We propose the relative loss of packet rate between the sender and the receiver (Relative Rate Reduction, RR…
Network congestion has become a critical issue for resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), especially for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs)where large volume of multimedia data is transmitted through the network. If the traffic load is greater than the available capacity of the sensor network, congestion occurs and it causes buffer overflow, packet drop, deterioration of network throughput and quality of service (QoS). Again, the faulty nodes of the network also aggravate congestion by diffusing useless packets or retransmitting the same packet several times. This resul…
