Active Window Management: Performance Assessment through an Extensive Comparison with XCP

摘要

The most efficient approaches defined so far to address performance degradations in end-to-end congestion control exploit the flow control mechanism to improve end-to-end performance. The most authoritative solution in this context seems to be the eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP) which achieves high performance but requires changes in both network routers and hosts which make it difficult to deploy. To this aim we have developed a new mechanism, called Active Window Management (AWM), which is able to maintain the queue length in network routers almost constant providing no loss, while maximizing network utilization. The idea at the basis of AWM is to allow network routers to manipulate the Advertised Window field in TCP ACKs. In this way no modifications to the TCP protocol are required. The target of this paper is to propose an extensive numerical analysis of AWM to compare it with the XCP protocol, chosen as reference case.