TCP congestion control algorithm for heterogeneous Internet

Abstract

The available bandwidth, round trip time (RTT) and packet loss rate can vary over many orders of magnitude, which characterizes the heterogeneity of the Internet. To cope with the heterogeneity in Internet congestion control, we propose a new TCP protocol known as INVS that contains three key components: (1) INVS employs an exponential-function-based growth function of the congestion window, which is more efficient than the cubic function in CUBIC; (2) INVS introduces an adaptive increase factor into the growth function to ensure that the window growth rate matches the path condition, and this increase factor measures the path condition using a custom function of the available bandwidth and minimum RTT; (3) INVS adopts an adaptive queue threshold in the loss classification scheme to improve the performance of TCP over lossy links. In addition, INVS requires modification only on the TCP sender and traces the path capacity to enable quick convergence of the congestion window. The performance analysis and evaluation show that INVS achieves good throughput, fairness, RTT-fairness and utilization in heterogeneous networks.