Abstract
Two key mechanisms of the Internet are congestion control in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Active Queue Management (AQM) in routers. The former divides the bandwidth between flows and prevents the Internet from congestion collapse. Simultaneously, the latter informs hosts of the forthcoming congestion by preventive dropping of packets in network nodes. Although these two key mechanisms may severely interact with each other, they are often being researched independently, in parallel. This has led to the development of a few new congestion controls and AQM algorithms known for excellent performance under the assumption that the counterpart remains unaltered. It is unclear, however, how these new solutions in both areas interact with each other. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap. Namely, in an extensive set of simulations, the impact of interactions between the state-of-the-art congestion control and AQM algorithms on the TCP connection performance is studied. As a result, recommendations for using some particular TCP-AQM pairs, which are observed to perform especially well, are formulated.
Highlights
Congestion is an inevitable phenomenon in many wired and wireless networks as network resources are limited in the available bandwidth
This paper focuses on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) versions implemented in currently used operating systems and, according to [2], the most commonly used, i.e., TCP New Reno, TCP Compound, and TCP Cubic
We focus on two Active Queue Management (AQM): Proportional Integral Enhanced (PIE) and CoDel
Summary
Congestion is an inevitable phenomenon in many wired and wireless networks as network resources are limited in the available bandwidth. Every user must send data at the “correct” rate to effectively use the available resources concerning other users. This is the main role of congestion control implemented in TCP. Its main role is to control the transmission rate to maximize the utilization of the available bandwidth and respond to emerging congestion, provide reliable data delivery, and provide a fair share of link capacity to all competing flows. In 1998, IETF indicated that the Congestion Avoidance mechanism of TCP, powerful and essential, should be complemented with Active Queue Management (AQM) in network nodes [3]. The main role of AQM is to predict the incoming congestion and preventively drop some packets to reduce the transmission rate of TCP sources.
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