SIRENS: An Explicit Notification Framework for Internet Congestion Control

Using explicit notification that indicates internal network conditions is a promising way to address the performance issues of congestion control in high-speed networks. In this paper, we propose SIRENS, a scalable, robust, and flexible fine-grained explicit notification framework. SIRENS is a per-hop and in-band notification scheme in which each router captures a snapshot of the various kinds of downstream link status along the IP-level path from a sender to a receiver and notifies the receiver of the status. The receiver can find out the overall path status by assembling all the cumulative notifications that indicate the status in each of the single hops and by feedback can share this information with the sender. Such per-hop information is needed by end-hosts if we are to flexibly design novel congestion control mechanisms or to significantly improve the performance of conventional forms of congestion control. We show that SIRENS can be used to configure TCP Limited Slow-Start and to improve the performance of multi-rate multicast congestion control.