Detecting shared congestion of flows via end-to-end measurement

Current Internet congestion control protocols operate independently on a per-flow basis. Recent work has demonstrated that cooperative congestion control strategies between flows can improve performance for a variety of applications, ranging from aggregated TCP transmissions to multiple-sender multicast applications. However, in order for this cooperation to be effective, one must first identify the flows that are congested at the same set of resources. In this paper, we present techniques based on loss or delay observations at end hosts to infer whether or not two flows experiencing congestion are congested at the same network resources. Our novel result is that such detection can be achieved for unicast flows, but the techniques can also be applied to multicast flows. We validate these techniques via queueing analysis, simulation, and experimentation within the Internet. In addition, we demonstrate preliminary simulation results that show that the delay-based technique can determine whether two TCP flows are congested at the same set of resources. We also propose metrics that can be used as a measure of the amount of congestion sharing between two flows.

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