EVCP: a convergence time improved high-speed transport congestion control protocol

Abstract

The Internet evolves to incorporate very-high-bandwidth optical links and more large-delay satellite links. TCP faces new challenges in this unique environment. Theory and experiments showed that TCP becomes inefficient and is prone to be unstable as the per-flow product of bandwidth and latency increases, regardless of the queuing scheme. Variable-structure congestion Control Protocol (VCP) is proposed to address these problems. However, VCP has problem in terms of convergence time, i.e., it takes a long time for a new VCP flow to achieve fair bandwidth allocation if the existing VCP flows have large congestion windows. This paper proposed an Extended Variable-structure congestion Control Protocol (EVCP), which adopted a convergence controller. The basic idea of convergence controller is that if a flow has larger window than its fair window, its congestion window should be decreased more aggressively than usual in Multiplicative Decrease (MD) phase. Simulations showed that EVCP has better performance in terms of convergence time while keeping the advantages of VCP.