TCP MaxNet - implementation and experiments on the WAN in Lab

We describe implementation and performance of TCP MaxNet, a new protocol that uses a multi-bit explicit signaling approach to congestion control. The MaxNet sender algorithm operates by adjusting its congestion window in response to explicit feedback from the most congested link encountered in the network. This scheme has numerous theoretical advantages over the ubiquitous practice of adjusting the congestion window based on the total amount of congestion in the path. We implement the MaxNet control scheme on top of the existing Linux TCP/IP protocol framework and evaluate its performance in the high bandwidth-delay environment of the WAN in Lab. Our experiments show that MaxNet possesses the desirable properties that theory predicts: very short router queues and fair sharing among multiple flows of different RTTs.