Towards Practical Network-to-Network Congestion Control

We discuss the use of congestion control mechanisms at the network edges to complement traditional end-to-end congestion control. We argue that such mechanisms will be necessary in the future to deal with unresponsive and even misbehaving traffic flows. A flexible congestion control architecture is presented, together with concrete protocol designs building on the Network Border Patrol proposal. More precisely, we show how to integrate flexible flow aggregation and connection admission control mechanisms into the NBP framework, together with improvements to the original scheduling mechanism. Performance evaluation using the ns-2 simulator is presented, and possibilities for future enhancements and open issues are also discussed.