MaxNet: a congestion control architecture

Abstract

On the Internet all the bottlenecked links of a source to destination path contribute to the aggregate congestion signal that controls the source rate. We introduce an architecture, MaxNet, in which only one link, the most severely bottlenecked link on the end-to-end path, controls the source rate. We prove that MaxNet results in MaxMin fairness for sources with general homogenous utility functions and the current architecture may not. MaxNet is distributed and requires no global information or per-flow state in the link.