Network Calculus Characterization of Congestion Control for Time-Varying Traffic

Models for the dynamics of congestion control generally involve systems of coupled differential equations. Universally, these models assume that traffic sources saturate the maximum transmissions allowed by the congestion control method. This is not suitable for studying congestion control of intermittent but bursty traffic sources. In this paper, we present a characterization of congestion control for arbitrary time-varying traffic that applies to rate-based as well as window-based congestion control. We leverage the capability of network calculus to precisely describe the input-output relationship at network elements for arbitrary source traffic. We show that our characterization can closely track the dynamics of even complex congestion control algorithms.