Congestion Control in Computer Networks: Trends and Issues

Many applications want to use TCP congestion control to regulate the transmission rate of a data packet stream. A natural way to achieve this goal is to transport the data packet stream on a TCP connection. However, because TCP implements both congestion and error control, transporting a data packet stream directly using a TCP connection forces the data packet stream to be subject to TCP's other properties caused by TCP error control, which may be inappropriate for these appl...

The traditional TCP congestion control mechanism encounters a number of new problems and suffers a poor performance when the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used in multihop ad hoc networks. Many of the problems result from medium contention at the MAC layer. In this paper, I first illustrate that severe medium contention and congestion are intimately coupled, and TCP s congestion control algorithm becomes too coarse in its granularity, causing throughput instability and excessiv...

Maintaining the quality of service (QOS) and controlling the network congestion are quite complicated tasks. They cause degrading the performance of the network, and disturbing the continuous communication process. To overcome these issues, one step towards this dilemma has been taken in form of Pre-congestion notification (PCN) technique. PCN uses a packet marking technique within a PCN domain over IP networks. It is notified by egress node that works as guard at entry point...

Although delay-based congestion control protocols such as FAST promise to deliver better performance than traditional TCP Reno, they have not yet been widely incorporated to the Internet. Several factors have contributed to their lack of deployment. Probably, the main contributing factor is that they are not able to compete fairly against loss-based congestion control protocols. In fact, the transmission rate in equilibrium of delay-based approaches is always less than their ...

We present and investigate a novel and timely application domain for deep reinforcement learning (RL): Internet congestion control. Congestion control is the core networking task of modulating traffic sources' data-transmission rates to efficiently utilize network capacity, and is the subject of extensive attention in light of the advent of Internet services such as live video, virtual reality, Internet-of-Things, and more. We show that casting congestion control as RL enable...

With the emergence of new technologies, computer networks are becoming more structurally complex, diverse and heterogenous. The increasing discrepancy (among the interconnected networks) in data rates, delays, packet loss, and transmission scenarios, influence significantly the dynamics of congestion control (CC) parametrization. In contrast to the traditional endto-end CC algorithms that rely on strict rules, new approaches aim to involve machine learning in order to continu...

Development of optimal control procedures for congested networks is a key factor in maintaining efficient network utilization. The absence of congestion control mechanism or its failure can lead to the lack of availability for certain network segments, and in severe cases -- for the entire network. The paper presents an analytical model describing the operation of the TCP Reno congestion control algorithm in terms of differential calculus and queuing systems. The purpose of t...

Satellite communication systems are the means of realizing a global broadband integrated services digital network. Due to the statistical nature of the integrated services traffic, the resulting rate fluctuations and burstiness render congestion control a complicated, yet indispensable function. The long propagation delay of the earth-satellite link further imposes severe demands and constraints on the congestion control schemes, as well as the media access control techniques...

Ad-hoc social networks (ASNETs) represent a special type of traditional ad-hoc network in which a user's social properties (such as the social connections and communications metadata as well as application data) are leveraged for offering enhanced services in a distributed infrastructureless environments. However, the wireless medium, due to limited bandwidth, can easily suffer from the problem of congestion when social metadata and application data are exchanged among nodes-...

As the speed and the dynamic range of computer networks evolve, the issue of efficient traffic management becomes increasingly important. This work describes an approach to traffic management using explicit rate information provided to the source by the network. We present an asynchronous distributed algorithm for optimal rate calculation across the network, where optimality is understood in the maxmin sense. The algorithm quickly converges to the optimal rates and is shown t...