Processor Sharing Flows in the Internet

Most congestion control algorithms try to emulate processor sharing (PS) by giving each competing flow an equal share of a bottleneck link. This approach leads to fairness, and prevents long flows from hogging resources. For example, if a set of flows with the same round trip time share a bottleneck link, TCP’s congestion control mechanism tries to achieve PS; so do most of the proposed alternatives, such as eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP). But although they emulate PS well in a static scenario when all flows are long-lived, they do not come close to PS when new flows arrive randomly and have a finite amount of data to send, as is the case in today’s Internet. Typically, flows take an order of magnitude longer to complete with TCP or XCP than with PS, suggesting large room for improvement. And so in this paper, we explore how a new congestion control algorithm — Rate Control Protocol (RCP) — comes much closer to emulating PS over a broad range of operating conditions. In...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IWQOS
• Authors: Nandita Dukkipati, Masayoshi Kobayashi, Rui Zhang-Shen, Nick McKeown
• Keywords: Bottleneck Link, Communications, Congestion Control, Congestion Control Algorithm, IWQOS 2005