Fair background data transfers of minimal delay impact

—In this paper we present a methodology for the design of congestion control protocols for background data transfers that have a minimal delay impact on short TCP transfers and compete for a target share of the leftover average capacity with other background TCP transfers. We analytically compute the optimal policy and show that it’s delay performance can be well approximated by a weighted TCP policy, which maintains a target proportion of TCPs bandwidth at all times in order to achieve the same share of excess capacity. The relative approximation error is always less than 17.2% while it quickly decreases to zero as the number of coexisting background TCP flows increases. Next, we consider a general utility-based fairness criterion for sharing the leftover average capacity, including a penalty term capturing the delay impact to short flows. The criterion is jointly optimized over all allocations of excess capacity to background flows (including TCP ones) on long timescales, and ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Costas Courcoubetis, Antonis Dimakis
• Keywords: Approximation Error, Communications, Congestion Control Algorithms, Fairness Criterion, INFOCOM 2012