Explicit congestion control based on 1-bit probabilistic marking

Abstract

It has been recognized that router-assisted congestion control based on explicit-rate feedback exhibits better performance than the implicit feedback mechanisms currently available on the Internet. However, the deployment of explicit-rate algorithms in the Internet poses some challenges, in particular, the requirement of multi-byte congestion notifications per packet. In this paper, we present a new mechanism for congestion control signaling, based on probabilistic marking of 1-bit feedback channels. The scheme is suitable for router algorithms that were originally devised for multi-byte explicit-rate marking. The proposed mechanism, which includes a source algorithm and a router marking procedure, removes the deployment constraints concerning multi-byte feedback while keeping the essential characteristics and performance of the router algorithms. We show, through simulation, that the performance of router-assisted control of sources subject to the proposed binary feedback is close to the performance obtained with sources subject to explicit-rate feedback.