One more bit is enough

Achieving efficient and fair bandwidth allocation while minimizing packet loss in high bandwidth-delay product networks has long been a daunting challenge. Existing endto-end congestion control (e.g., TCP) and traditional congestion notification schemes (e.g., TCP+AQM/ECN) have significant limitations in achieving this goal. While the recently proposed XCP protocol addresses this challenge, XCP requires multiple bits to encode the congestion-related information exchanged between routers and end-hosts. Unfortunately, there is no space in the IP header for these bits, and solving this problem involves a non-trivial and timeconsuming standardization process. In this paper, we design and implement a simple, lowcomplexity protocol, called Variable-structure congestion Control Protocol (VCP), that leverages only the existing two ECN bits for network congestion feedback, and yet achieves comparable performance to XCP, i.e., high utilization, low persistent queue length, negligible packet l...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Yong Xia, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Ion Stoica, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
• Keywords: Congestion Control, Endto-end Congestion Control, SIGCOMM 2005, XCP Protocol