NeTS: Small: Internet Congestion Control Census

University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE

Investigators

Abstract

The Internet has recently been evolving from homogeneous congestion control to heterogeneous congestion control. Five years ago, Internet traffic was mainly controlled by the standard TCP AIMD algorithm, whereas Internet traffic is now controlled by many different congestion control algorithms. However, there is very little work on the performance and stability study of the Internet with heterogeneous congestion control. One fundamental reason is the lack of the deployment information of different congestion control algorithms. Motivated by the increasing number of public, private, and proprietary congestion control algorithms deployed in the Internet and the lack of the information about the heterogeneous Internet, the goals of this project are to 1) design methodologies and tools for identifying the congestion control algorithms and related parameters of Internet nodes and flows, and 2) conduct large scale comprehensive measurements for identifying and evaluating the congestion control algorithms in the heterogeneous Internet. As an analogy, if we consider the Internet as a country, an Internet node as a house and a congestion control algorithm running at a node as a person living at a house, this project is to conduct a population census in the country of the Internet. Just like the population census is vital for the study and planning of the society, the proposed congestion control census is vital for the study and planning of the Internet. The expected results of this project include methodologies and tools for identifying congestion control algorithms, and a congestion control census database containing measurement results.