Jointly coordinating ECN and TCP for rapid adaptation to varying bandwidth

The introduction of service differentiation in the Internet implies that the residual bandwidth available to best-effort traffic becomes highly variable. We explore the design of a rapidly-reactive congestion control framework, where the ECN-aware best-effort flows aggressively go after any unused capacity. By making routers mark packets in a much more aggressive manner, we are able to achieve fast backoff in the network without resorting to the TCP´s current drastic step of halving the congestion window. Simulations indicate that our ECN-mod protocol is better than ECN-NewReno in exploiting rapid variations in the available bandwidth. Moreover, the milder backoff policy of ECN-mod also makes the link utilization less dependent on the exact values of the parameters in the router marking function.