Subject: I-D Action:draft-mathis-iccrg-relentless-tcp-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 12:45:02 -0800 (PST)

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Relentless Congestion Control
	Author(s)       : M. Mathis
	Filename        : draft-mathis-iccrg-relentless-tcp-00.txt
	Pages           : 10
	Date            : 2009-03-04

Relentless congestion control is a simple modification that can be
applied to almost any AIMD style congestion control: instead of
applying a multiplicative reduction to cwnd after a loss, cwnd is
reduced by the number of lost segments.  It can be modeled as a
strict implementation of van Jacobson's Packet Conservation
Principle.  During recovery, new segments are injected into the
network in exact accordance with the segments that are reported to
have been delivered to the receiver by the returning ACKs.

This algorithm offers a valuable new congestion control property: the
TCP portion of the control loop has exactly unity gain, which should
make it easier to implement simple controllers in network devices to
accurately control queue sizes across a huge range of scales.

Relentless Congestion Control conforms to neither the details nor the
philosophy of current congestion control standards.  These standards
are based on the idea that the Internet can attain sufficient
fairness by having relatively simple network devices send uniform
congestion signals to all flows, and mandating that all protocols
have equivalent responses to these congestion signals.

To function appropriately in a shared environment, Relentless
Congestion Control requires that the network allocates capacity
through some technique such as Fair Queuing, Approximate Fair
Dropping, etc.  The salient features of these algorithms are that
they segregate the traffic into distinct flows, and send different
congestion signals to each flow.  This alternative congestion control
paradigm is described in a separate document, also under
consideration by the ICCRG.

The goal of the document is to illustrate some new protocol features
and properties might be possible if we relax the "TCP-friendly"
mandate.  A secondary goal of Relentless TCP is to make a distinction
between the bottlenecks that belong to protocol itself, vs standard
congestion control and the "TCP-friendly" paradigm.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mathis-iccrg-relentless-tcp-00.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

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