Uncooperative congestion control

Abstract

Traditionally uncooperative rate control schemes have implied open loop protocols such as UDP, CBR, etc. In this paper we show that closed loop uncooperative rate control schemes also exist and that the current AQM proposals cannot efficiently control their mis-behavior. Moreover, these proposals require that AQM be installed at all routers in the Internet which is not only expensive but requires significant network upgrade.In this paper we show that management of uncooperative flows need not be coupled with AQM design but can be viewed as edge based policing question. In this paper we propose an analytical model for managing uncooperative flows in the Internet by re-mapping their utility function to a target range of utility functions. This mapping can be achieved by transparently manipulating congestion penalties conveyed to the uncooperative users.The most interesting aspect of this research is that this task can be performed at the edge of the network with little state information about uncooperative flows. The proposed solution is independent of the buffer management algorithm deployed on the network. As such it works with Drop-Tail queues as well as any AQM scheme. We have analyzed the framework and evaluated it on various single and multi-bottleneck topologies with both Drop-Tail and RED. Our results show that the framework is robust and works well even in presence of background traffic and reverse path congestion.