A Clean Slate Design of the Internet's Congestion Control Algorithm
Slides
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Abstract
If we get a chance to redesign the Internet's congestion control
algorithm how would we do it ? Today's research on congestion control
universally focuses on metrics such as link utilization which are
perhaps helpful from the network operator's point of view, but do not
mean much to a user. A user only cares about how quickly a flow
finishes; so a more meaningful metric for congestion control is flow-
completion time. In this talk, I will describe a new congestion
control algorithm --- Rate Control Protocol (RCP) --- whose goal is
to finish flows as quickly as possible. We find that under typical
Internet conditions, flows using RCP complete one to two orders of
magnitude faster than with TCP and even the newly proposed schemes
such as eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP). In RCP, a router assigns a
single rate to all flows that pass through it and does not keep flow-
state, and does no per-packet computation. We show that RCP finishes
flows very close to the minimum achievable time, under a wide range
of traffic characteristics and network conditions.