Performance of TCP Congestion Control with Explicit Rate Feedback

Karnik, Aditya and Kumar, Anurag (2005) Performance of TCP Congestion Control with Explicit Rate Feedback. In: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 13 (1). pp. 108-120.

Preview

PDF 01402475.pdf Download (656kB)

Abstract

We consider a modification of TCP congestion control in which the congestion window is adapted to explicit bottleneck rate feedback; we call this RATCP (Rate Adaptive TCP). Our goal in this paper is to study and compare the performance of RATCP and TCP in various network scenarios with a view to understanding the possibilities and limits of providing better feedback to TCP than just implicit feedback via packet loss. To understand the dynamics of rate feedback and window control, we develop and analyze a model for a long-lived RATCP (and TCP) session that gets a time-varying rate on a bottleneck link. We also conduct experiments on a Linux based test-bed to study issues such as fairness, random losses, and randomly arriving short file transfers. We find that the analysis matches well with the results from the test-bed. For large file transfers, under low background load, ideal fair rate feedback improves the performance of TCP by 15%-20%. For small randomly arriving file transfers, though RATCP performs only slightly better than TCP it reduces losses and variability of throughputs across sessions. RATCP distinguishes between congestion and corruption losses, and ensures fairness for sessions with different round trip times sharing the bottleneck link. We believe that rate feedback mechanisms can be implemented using distributed flow control and recently proposed REM in which case, ECN bit itself can be used to provide the rate feedback.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	�©2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Keywords:	congestion control;rate feedback;TCP
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Communication Engineering
Date Deposited:	05 Aug 2005
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:19
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/3457

Actions (login required)

View Item