The incremental deployability of RTT-based congestion avoidance for high speed TCP Internet connections

Our research focuses on end-to-end congestion avoidance algorithms that use round trip time (RTT) fluctuations as an indicator of the level of network congestion. The algorithms are referred to as delay-based congestion avoidance or DCA. Due to the economics associated with deploying change within an existing network, we are interested in an incrementally deployable enhancement to the TCP/Reno protocol. For instance, TCP/Vegas, a DCA algorithm, has been proposed as an incremental enhancement. Requiring relatively minor modifications to a TCP sender, TCP/Vegas has been shown to increase end-to-end TCP throughput primarily by avoiding packet loss. We study DCA in today's best effort Internet where IP switches are subject to thousands of TCP flows resulting in congestion with time scales that span orders of magnitude. Our results suggest that RTT-based congestion avoidance may not be reliably incrementally deployed in this environment. Through extensive measurement and simulation, w...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Jim Martin, Arne A. Nilsson, Injong Rhee
• Keywords: Congestion Avoidance, Delay-based Congestion Avoidance, Hardware, Network Congestion, SIGMETRICS 2000