Impact of cross traffic burstiness on the packet-scale paradigm

The packet-scale paradigm is a novel framework for achieving ultra-high speed congestion control. Due to its reliance on finely-controlled inter-packet gaps, the paradigm is expected to be sensitive to transient burstiness in traffic encountered on bottleneck links. This paper uses a first-principles approach to study the impact of cross traffic burstiness on the efficiency of the packet-scale paradigm. It relies on a simple periodic on-off model for cross traffic and studies the interaction of the burstiness timescale, round-trip times, and the smoothing filters adopted by the paradigm. The analysis is validated against ns-2 simulations with a prototype. Our analysis helps gain fundamental insights on the impact of several factors.