JetMax: Scalable Max-Min Congestion Control for High-Speed Heterogeneous Networks

Recent surge of interest towards congestion control that relies on single-router feedback (e.g., XCP [12], RCP [1], [5], MaxNet [24], EMKC [28], VCP [26]) suggests that such systems may offer certain benefits over traditional models of additive packet loss [13]. Besides topology-independent stability and faster convergence to efficiency/fairness [24], it was recently shown [28] that any stable single-router system with a symmetric Jacobian tolerates arbitrary fixed, as well as time-varying, feedback delays. Although delay-independence is an appealing characteristic, the EMKC system developed in [28] exhibits undesirable equilibrium properties and slow convergence behavior. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new method called JetMax and show that it admits a low-overhead implementation inside routers (three additions per packet), overshoot-free transient and steady state, tunable link utilization, and delay-insensitive flow dynamics. The proposed framework also provides capacity-independent convergence time, where fairness and utilization are reached in the same number of RTT steps for a link of any bandwidth. Given a 1 mb/s, 10 gb/s, or googol (10) bps link, the method converges to within 1% of the stationary state in 6 control intervals. We finish the paper by comparing JetMax’s performance to that of existing methods in ns2 simulations and discussing its Linux implementation.