Common problems in delay-based congestion control algorithms: a gallery of solutions

ABSTRACT Although delay‐based congestion control protocols such as FAST Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) 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 fair share when they share the network with traditional TCP Reno derivatives that employ packet losses as their congestion signal. There are also other performance impairments caused by the sensitivity to errors in the measurement of the congestion signal (queuing delay) that reduce the efficiency and the intra‐protocol fairness of the algorithms. In this paper, we report, analyse and discuss some recent proposals in the literature to improve the dynamic behaviour of delay‐based congestion control algorithms, FAST in particular. The coexistence of sources reacting differently to congestion, the identification of congestion appearance in the reverse path and the persistent congestion problem are the issues specifically addressed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Delay based congestion protocols, like Vegas or FAST TCP, promise much improved performance over traditional loss‐based alternatives. However, in their traditional implementations they exhibit some suboptimal behaviors that prevent their deployment in the public Internet. This paper analyzes these shortcomings and summarizes the main solutions that have been proposed to fix them in the last few years.