Generic congestion control

Abstract

The nowadays Internet architecture is mainly based on unicast communications and best-effort service. However, the development of the Internet encouraged emerging services that are sensitive to delay or packet loss, as it is the case for multimedia and group applications. The deployment of these applications should not compromise the proper transmission of TCP flows and would benefit significantly from flows that are responsive to congestion. We propose efficient congestion avoidance mechanism (ECAM) 1 This work was done while A. Dracinschi was at LIP6––work done under Grant RNRT@irs. 1 as a generic framework for congestion control in the Internet, to address this lack and important need of congestion control in various situations that occurs in the Internet. ECAM is designed for uncontrolled unicast and multicast traffic and supports both reliable and unreliable best-effort flows. ECAM works not only for best-effort service, but supports as well the new differentiated services, where out of profile packets may experience congestion. Implementation problems are also discussed.