New techniques for making transport protocols robust to corruption-based loss

Current congestion control algorithms treat packet loss as an indication of network congestion, under the assumption that most losses are caused by router queues overflowing. In response to losses (congestion), a sender reduces its sending rate in an effort to reduce contention for shared network resources. In network paths where a non-negligible portion of loss is caused by packet corruption, performance can suffer due to needless reductions of the sending rate (in response to "perceived congestion" that is not really happening). This paper explores a technique, called Cumulative Explicit Transport Error Notification (CETEN), that uses information provided by the network to bring the transport's long-term average sending rate closer to that dictated by only congestion-based losses. We discuss several ways that information about the cumulative rates of packet loss due to congestion and corruption might be obtained from the network or through fairly generic transport layer instrumentation. We then explore two ways to use this information to develop a more appropriate congestion control response (CETEN). The work in this paper is done in terms of TCP. Since numerous transport protocols use TCP-like congestion control schemes, the CETEN techniques we present are applicable to other transports as well. In this paper, we present early simulation results that show CETEN to be a promising technique. In addition, this paper discusses a number of practical and thorny implementation issues associated with CETEN.

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