Slowdown as a Metric for Congestion Control Fairness
Adrian Zapletal, Fernando A. Kuipers · 2023
The conventional definition of fairness in congestion control is flow rate fairness. However, Internet users typically care about flow completion times (FCTs) and flow rate fairness does not lead to equitable FCTs for different users. Therefore, we reconsider what it means for congestion control to be fair and posit a novel stance on fairness: it is fair when no flow unnecessarily prolongs another flow. Based on this stance, we propose an evaluation framework for congestion control fairness that uses slowdown (normalized FCT) as the metric.