Abstract

A TCP flow is congestion responsive because it reduces its send window upon the appearance of congestion. An aggregate of nonpersistent TCP flows, however, may not be congestion responsive, depending on whether the flow (or session) arrival process reacts to congestion or not. In this paper, we describe a methodology for the passive estimation of traffic congestion responsiveness. The methodology aims to classify every TCP session as either "open-loop" or "closed-loop". In the closed-loop model, the arrival of a session depends on the completion of the previous session from the same user. When the network is congested, the arrival of a new session from that user is delayed. On the other hand, in the openloop model, TCP sessions arrive independently of previous sessions from the same user. The aggregate traffic that the open-loop model generates is not congestion responsive, despite the fact that each individual flow in the aggregate is congestion responsive. Our measurements at a dozen of access and core links show that more than 60-80% of the traffic that we could analyze (mostly HTTP traffic) follows the closed-loop model. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The TCP congestion control protocol is mainly designed for bandwidth symmetric paths. As two-way asymmetric connections will probably become common case in the future with the widespread use of ADSL, satellites and other high-speed technologies, it is important to make sure that congestion will be properly handled in these environments. To this end, we propose in this paper a new Adaptive Class-based Queuing mechanism called ACQ for handling two-way TCP traffic over links that exhibit bandwidth asymmetry. ACQ runs at the entry of the slow link and relies on two separate classes, one for ACK packets and one for Data packets. ACQ proposes to adapt the weights of both classes according to the crossing traffic in order to maximize some utility function defined by the user or the network operator. We show by simulations that our mechanism is able to reach a good utilization of the available resources, managing then to maximize the satisfaction of the user of such asymmetric connections. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book