Unified Explicit Router Feedback Framework for Unicast and Multicast Congestion Control

摘要

Congestion control with explicit router feedback, such as TCP Quick-Start, XCP, and PTP, is a promising way to enhance the performance of data transport especially in high-speed networks. In this paper, we study congestion control with explicit router feedback using hardware-based high-performance network emulator. The network emulator consists of a general-purpose network processor and two Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, where new explicit router feedback functions can be easily implemented and evaluated. The goal of this paper is to gain an insight into feasibility of explicit router feedback and to give a possible direction to design explicit router feedback for congestion control. To this end, we first discuss feasibility of fine-grained explicit router feedback through the experience of developing the high-performance network emulator and evaluations of the performance. In addition, based on the discussion, we propose a unified explicit router feedback framework. The framework can be applied to a broad class of transport protocols and can provide fine-grained feedback information fundamentally required by end-hosts to design a novel congestion control mechanism or to significantly enhance the performance of traditional congestion control in specific situations. As one possible application of the unified explicit router feedback framework, we show the optimized TCP Limited Slow-Start. Through the implementation and evaluation, we make sure that a sender can shift from slow start phase to congestion avoidance phase without any packet drop, and can achieve more effective bandwidth utilization. We also show extended multi-rate multicast congestion control as another application.