MPCP: multi packet congestion-control protocol

In the recent years, end-to-end feedback-based variants of TCP as well as VCP have emerged as practical alternatives of congestion control by requiring the use of only one or two ECN bits in the IP header. However, all such schemes suffer from a relatively low speed of convergence and exhibit a biased fairness behavior in moderate bandwidth high delay networks due to utilizing an insufficient amount of congestion feedback. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed ECN-based congestion control protocol to which we refer as Multi Packet Congestion Control Protocol (MPCP). In contrast to other alternatives, MPCP is able to relay a more precise congestion feedback yet preserve the utilization of the two ECN bits. MPCP distributes (extracts) congestion related information into (from) a series of n packets, thus allowing for a 2n-bit quantization of congestion measures with each packet carrying two of 2n bits in its ECN bits. We describe the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of MPCP through both simulations and experimental studies.

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