Comparison of Congestion-Control Feedback Approaches for Heterogeneous and Dynamically Changing Networks
Michael Savori, Joachim Sachs, Stephan Baucke · 2004
Abstract—In the current Internet, TCP’s congestion control is performed end-to-end, possibly assisted by simple and limited congestion feedback mechanisms in routers such as Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) or Random Early Detection (RED). In order to control network traffic more accurately by reducing or even preventing congestion in (parts of) the network, and to improve the overall performance of TCP flows, a number of more complex and powerful feedback mechanisms for use in routers have been proposed. This paper describes the main ideas behind some of the most important of such router congestion feedback (RCF) approaches based on network-information sharing (NIS). In addition, the properties, functionalities, and expected performance gain of these RCF approaches are compared and their applicability in the current Internet environment is investigated. The aim of this paper is to find potential RCF candidates that can be used to improve congestion control in the current Internet as well as in future IPbased networks where diverse wired and wireless access technologies are used in parallel.