Distributed congestion control for heterogeneous networks
Sponsor: NSF
Abstract
In light of TCP’s scalability issues in high bandwidth-delay networks, explicit-feedback congestion control has gained renewed interest in the last several years. Sometimes referred to as Active Queue Management (AQM) congestion control, these algorithms rely on routers to provide the various types of congestion feedback including changes to the congestion window, packet loss, single-bit congestion indication, queuing delay, and link prices. This project aims to explore the various properties of the prior AQM methods, propose new controllers that improve the performance of existing approaches in highly heterogeneous network conditions, and evaluate their performance in a network of software and hardware routers.
Journal Papers
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Conference Papers
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Detailed Project Description
MKC
Max-min Kelly Control (MKC) is an active queue management (AQM) congestion control for high-speed networks. MKC collects feedback from the most-congested router along each flow's path and achieves many desirable properties of congestion control including:
Quick convergence to link utilization. MKC takes the same number of RTT steps to fully utilize a 10 mb/s, 10 gb/s, or googol bps link. For the parameters shown in the MKC paper, 99% utilization is reached in 6-7 RTTs for any link capacity. | |
RTT-independent fairness. All flows sharing the same bottleneck receive an equal share of the bandwidth, regardless of their round-trip delay or path length. | |
Asymptotic stability under consistent bottleneck assignment and all types of delay. Flow rates converge to the equilibrium without oscillation under both heterogeneous and time-varying feedback delays. | |
Insensitivity to reverse-path congestion. MKC is not sensitive to the delay dynamics of the reverse path. | |
Low overhead. MKC requires one addition per arriving packet inside routers and utilizes a fixed control interval length for generating feedback. The MKC packet header is only 20 bytes. |
JetMax
JetMax is an improvement of MKC that eliminates its steady-state packet loss, allows tunable link utilization, and improves the convergence rate to fairness. It inherits the above properties of MKC and additionally exhibits the following features:
Zero packet loss. Loss-free operation is ensured both in the transient and stationary state. | |
Tunable link utilization. Each router can be independently configured such that the flows bottlenecked at that router automatically achieve arbitrary link utilization. | |
Quick convergence to max-min fairness. Fairness is reached in a fixed number of RTT steps regardless of link capacity or number of flows in the network. | |
Low overhead. JetMax requires three additions per arriving packet inside routers and 28 bytes in the header. It also allows simple integration into Linux and Windows 2003 kernels. |
Simulation Code
Ns2 simulation code (MKC, JetMax)