Title :
On improving the fairness of TCP congestion avoidance
Author :
Henderson, Thomas R. ; Sahouria, Emile ; McCanne, Steven ; Katz, Randy H.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA
Abstract :
We report on a simulation-based study of the efficacy of modified congestion avoidance algorithms on TCP fairness. We first examined whether a change to that algorithm, as proposed by Floyd (1991), that results in a “constant-rate” additive increase policy can correct the bias against connections with long round trip times (RTTs). Our first main result is that although the constant-rate policy can improve fairness dramatically, we found it difficult to successfully implement such a policy in a heterogeneous network. Next, we explored whether TCP connections with long RTTs could independently improve their own throughputs by becoming slightly more aggressive during the additive increase phase of congestion avoidance. Our second main result is that the judicious use of such a policy is beneficial for long RTT connections, without significantly affecting the performance of peer connections along the same path, thereby improving our metric of network fairness without compromising the utilization of the bottleneck link
Keywords :
Internet; performance evaluation; queueing theory; telecommunication congestion control; transport protocols; FIFO queueing; Floyd algorithm; Internet; TCP congestion avoidance; TCP connections; additive increase policy; bottleneck link utilization; congestion avoidance; constant-rate additive increase policy; first in first out queueing; heterogeneous network; long round trip times; modified congestion avoidance algorithms; network fairness; peer connections; performance evaluation; random early detection; simulation-based study; throughputs; Bandwidth; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Control systems; Helium; Heuristic algorithms; Internet; Probes; Protocols; Throughput;
Conference_Titel :
Global Telecommunications Conference, 1998. GLOBECOM 1998. The Bridge to Global Integration. IEEE
Conference_Location :
Sydney,NSW
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-4984-9
DOI :
10.1109/GLOCOM.1998.775786