Probe-Aided MulTCP: An Aggregate Congestion Control Mechanism

AbstractA number of new application scenarios, e.g. mo-bile/wireless TCP proxies, edge to edge overlays, QoS provi-sioning and mass data transport, are calling for aggregate ow management. In this paper we show that applying a single owshare to an aggregate ow will result in unfairness in the bandwidth sharing between the aggregate trafc and the background ows sharing the same bottleneck. To overcome this problem, we propose an aggregate congestion control mechanism, namely probe-aided MulTCP, which dynamically adjusts the congestion window loop to support multiple owshares for an aggregate. The probe-aided MulTCP differs from existing works, such as MPAT, CP, MulTCP, in the following aspects. Firstly, our simulations show that against the traditional MulTCP the probe-aided MulTCP could maintain relatively stable, smooth and fair performance over a wide range of weight N in steady conditions as well as in varied congestion conditions. Secondly, an adjusting window loop is introduced to constantly probe the congestion situation and dynamically adjust the congestion window size for the newly arriving and leaving ows within the aggregate. This integration of congestion information improves the start-up performance for new arriving ows, especially for short-lived ones. Thus, the probe-aided MulTCP is lightweight since only one extra probe window loop is used. Our extensive simulatio