Packet-Scale Congestion Control Paradigm

This paper presents the packet-scale paradigm for designing end-to-end congestion control protocols for ultra-high speed networks. The paradigm discards the legacy framework of RTT-scale protocols, and instead builds upon two revolutionary foundations-that of continually probing for available bandwidth at short timescales, and that of adapting the data sending rate so as to avoid overloading the network. Through experimental evaluations with a prototype, we report high performance gains along several dimensions in high-speed networks-the steady-state throughput, adaptability to dynamic cross-traffic, RTT-fairness, and co-existence with the conventional TCP traffic mixes. The paradigm also opens up several issues that are less of a concern for traditional protocols-we summarize our approaches for addressing these.