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Limitations of equation-based congestion control

Published: 22 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We study limitations of an equation-based congestion control protocol, called TFRC (TCP Friendly Rate Control). It examines how the three main factors that determine TFRC throughput, namely, the TCP friendly equation, loss event rate estimation and delay estimation, can influence the long-term throughput imbalance between TFRC and TCP. Especially, we show that different sending rates of competing flows cause these flows to experience different loss event rates. There are several fundamental reasons why TFRC and TCP flows have different average sending rates, from the first place. Earlier work shows that the convexity of the TCP friendly equation used in TFRC causes the sending rate difference. We report two additional reasons in this paper: (1) the convexity of 1/x where x is a loss event period and (2) different RTO (retransmission timeout period) estimations of TCP and TFRC. These factors can be the reasons for TCP and TFRC to experience initially different sending rates. But we find that the loss event rate difference due to the differing sending rates greatly amplifies the initial throughput difference; in some extreme cases, TFRC uses around 20 times more, or sometimes 10 times less, bandwidth than TCP.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 35, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
October 2005
324 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1090191
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '05: Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
    August 2005
    350 pages
    ISBN:1595930094
    DOI:10.1145/1080091
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 August 2005
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 35, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. congestion control
  2. equation-based rate control

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