Stable and scalable congestion control for high-speed heterogeneous networks

For any congestion control mechanisms, the most fundamental design objectives are stability and scalability. However, achieving both properties are very challenging in such a heterogeneous environment as the Internet. From the end-users' perspective, heterogeneity is due to the fact that different flows have different routing paths and therefore different communication delays, which can significantly affect stability of the entire system. In this work, we successfully address this problem by first proving a sufficient and necessary condition for a system to be stable under arbitrary delay. Utilizing this result, we design a series of practical congestion control protocols (MKC and JetMax) that achieve stability regardless of delay as well as many additional appealing properties. From the routers' perspective, the system is heterogeneous because the incoming traffic is a mixture of short- and long-lived, TCP and non-TCP flows. This imposes a severe challenge on traditional buffer sizing mechanisms, which are derived using the simplistic model of a single or multiple synchronized long-lived TCP flows. To overcome this problem, we take a control-theoretic approach and design a new intelligent buffer sizing scheme called Adaptive Buffer Sizing (ABS), which based on the current incoming traffic, dynamically sets the optimal buffer size under the target performance constraints. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that ABS exhibits quick responses to changes of traffic load, scalability to a large number of incoming flows, and robustness to generic Internet traffic.