Utility Based Framework for Reactive and Proactive Congestion Control in SDN

Abstract

Congestion in a network can cause several undesirable conditions such as packet loss, retransmission of packets, etc. There have been many variations of TCP for appropriate congestion control. These variations manage the sending rate of the users based upon the feedback they get from the network. In like manner, there are congestion control methods that take leverage of the Software Defined Networking and manage congestion from the controller. In this work we aim to manage congestion by coupling the activity of both the users and network controller in an SDN. We provide a utility based framework for a joint proactive and reactive mechanism for congestion control. We propose a system optimization function and show that our user and network congestion control methods optimize the system utility. Further, we simulate our model and show that our model significantly improves the system utility.