Improving the efficiency and fairness of eXplicit Control Protocol in multi-bottleneck networks

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has been extensively credited for the stability of the Internet. However, as the product of bandwidth and latency increases, TCP becomes inefficient and prone to instability. The eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP) is a novel and promising congestion control protocol that outperforms TCP in terms of efficiency, fairness, convergence speed, persistent queue length and packet loss rate. However, the XCP equilibrium solves a constrained max–min fairness problem instead of a standard max–min fairness problem. The additional constraint under XCP leads to inefficiency and unfairness for the topologies that have multiple bottleneck links.In this paper, according to classical control theory, we propose an XCP bandwidth compensation algorithm on basis of the proportional integral controller (PI-XCP), which reconfigures the available bandwidth variable from the fixed hardware determined physical link capacity value to a configuration value that can be dynamically changed. Through a reasonable online compensation, PI-XCP gets efficient and fair bandwidth allocation in a multi-bottleneck network. Extensive simulations have shown that PI-XCP indeed achieves this goal. Simulations also have shown that PI-XCP preserves good properties of XCP, including fast convergence, negligible queue length and zero packet loss rate. Compared with iXCP, an enhancement to address the XCP equilibrium problem, PI-XCP decreases the computational complexity significantly, and achieves more effective control in highly dynamic situations, especially in the presence of short-lived flows.