In communication networks, congestion control, routing, and multiple access schemes for scheduling transmissions are typically regulated by distributed algorithms. Engineers designed these algorithms using clever heuristics that they refined in the light of simulation results and experiments. Over the last two decades, a deeper understanding of these algorithms emerged through the work of researchers. This understanding has a real potential for improving the design of protocols for data centers, cloud computing, and even wireless networks. Since protocols tend to be standardized by engineers, it is important that they become familiar with the insights that emerged in research. We hope that this paper might appeal to practitioners and make the research results intuitive and useful. The methods that the paper describes may be useful for many other resource allocation problems such as in call centers, manufacturing lines, hospitals and the service industry.

In cloud computing, multiple users coexist in one datacenter infrastructure and the network is always shared using VMs. Network bandwidth allocation is necessary for security and performance guarantees in the datacenter. InfiniBand (IB) is more widely applied in the construction of datacenter cluster and attracts more interest from the academic field. In this paper, we propose an IB dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism IBShare to achieve different Weight-proportional and Min-guarantee requirements of allocation entities. The differentiated IB Congestion Control (CC) configuration is proven to offer the proportional throughput characteristic at the flow level. IBShare leverages distributed congestion detection, global congestion computation and configuration to dynamically provide predictable bandwidth division. The real IB experiment results showed IBShare can promptly adapt to the congestion variation and achieve the above two allocation demands through CC reconfiguration. IBShare improved the network utilization than reservation and its computation/configuration overhead was low.

We address the global asymptotic stability of FAST TCP, especially considering cross traffics, time-varying network feedback delay, and queuing delay dynamics at link. Exploiting the inherent dynamic property of FAST TCP, we construct two sequences that represent the lower and upper bound variations of the congestion window in time. By showing that the sequences converge to the equilibrium point of the congestion window, we establish that FAST TCP in itself is globally asymptotically stable without any specific conditions on the tuning parameter α or the update gain γ.

The overall performance of multi-hop cognitive radio networks (MHCRNs) can be improved significantly by employing the diversity of orthogonal licensed channels in underlay fashion. However, the mutual interference between secondary links and primary links and the congestion due to the contention among traffic flows traversing the shared link become obstacles to this realizing technique. How to control congestion efficiently in coordination with power and spectrum allocation optimally in order to obtain a high end-to-end throughput is motivating cross-layer designs for MHCRNs. In this paper, by taking into account the problem of joint rate adaption, power control, and spectrum allocation (JRPS), we propose a new cross-layer optimization framework for MHCRNs using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). Specifically, the JRPS formulation is shown to be a mix-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, which is NP-Hard in general. To solve the problem, we first develop a partially distributed algorithm, which is shown to converge to the global optimum within a reasonable time interval. We next propose a suboptimal solution which addresses the shortcomings of the first. Using numerical results, we finally demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

In large-scale data centers, two types of network are implemented: local area networks (LANs) and storage area networks (SANs). To achieve simple network management, integration of these two networks by Ethernet technology is of great interest. A SAN requires a significantly low frame loss rate. To integrate LANs and SANs, a multi-hop Ethernet configuration is generally used, and congestion may occur in traffic hot spots. Therefore, layer-2 congestion control that prevents frame loss in multi-hop Ethernet, Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN), is now discussed in IEEE 802.1Qau. In this paper, we evaluate QCN's throughput performance and reveal a technical problem with fairness among active flows. We also propose Adaptive BC_LIMIT for QCN where BC_LIMIT is adaptively decided according to current transmission rate of flows. Simulation results show that our proposed method significantly improves fairness among QCN flows.

In this letter, a Simple but Effective Congestion Control scheme (SECC) in VANET has been proposed to guarantee the successful transmissions for safety-related nodes. The strategy derive a Maximum Beacon Load Activity Indicator (MBLAI) to restrain the neighboring general periodical beacon load for the investigated safety-related “observation nodes”, i.e., the nodes associated with some emergent events. This mechanism actually reserves some bandwidth for the safety-related nodes to make them have higher priorities than periodical beacons to access channel. Different from the static congestion control scheme in IEEE802.11p, this strategy could provide dynamic control strength for congestion according to tolerant packets drop ratio for different applications.

Cubic TCP, one of transport protocols designed for high bandwidth-delay product (BDP) networks, has successfully been deployed in the Internet. Multi-homed computers with multiple interfaces to access the Internet via high speed links will become more popular. In this work, we introduce an extended version of Cubic TCP for multiple paths, called MPCubic. The extension process is approached from an analysis model of Cubic by using coordinated congestion control between paths. MPCubic can spread its traffic across paths in load-balancing manner, while preserving fair sharing with regular TCP, Cubic, and MPTCP at common bottlenecks. Moreover, to improve resilience to link failure, we propose a multipath fast recovery algorithm. The algorithm can significantly reduce the recovery time of data rate after restoration of failed links. These techniques can be useful for resilient high-bandwidth applications (for example, tele-health conference) in disaster-affected areas. Our simulation results show that MPCubic can achieve stability, throughput improvement, fairness, load-balancing, and quick data rate recovery from link failure under a variety of network conditions.

Nowadays portable devices with multiple wireless interfaces and using multimedia services are becoming more popular on the Internet. This paper describes a family of multipath binomial congestion control algorithms for audio/video streaming, where a low variant of transmission rate is important. We extend the fluid model of binomial algorithms for single-path transmission to support the concurrent transmission of packets across multiple paths. We focus on the extension of two particular algorithms, SQRT and IIAD, for multiple paths, called MPSQRT and MPIIAD, respectively. Additionally, we apply the design technique (using the multipath fluid model) for multipath TCP (MPTCP) into the extension of SQRT and IIAD, called fbMPSQRT and fbMPIIAD, respectively. Both two approaches ensure that multipath binomial congestion control algorithms achieve load-balancing, throughput improvement, and fairness to single-path binomial algorithms at shared bottlenecks. Through the simulations and comparison with the uncoordinated protocols MPSQRT/MPIIAD, fbMPSQRT/fbMPIIAD and MPTCP, we find that our extended multipath transport protocols can preserve lower latency and transmission rate variance than MPTCP, fairly share with single-path SQRT/IIAD, MPTCP and TCP, and also can achieve throughput improvements and load-balancing equivalent to those of MPTCP under various scenarios and network conditions.

A transmission control protocol (TCP) using an additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm for congestion control plays a leading role in advanced Internet services. However, the AIMD method shows only low link utilization in lossy networks with long delay such as satellite networks. This is because the cwnd dynamics of TCP are reduced by long propagation delay, and TCP uses an inadequate congestion control algorithm, which does not distinguish packet loss from wireless errors from that due to congestion of the wireless networks. To overcome these problems, we propose an exponential recovery (ER) TCP that uses the exponential recovery function for rapidly occupying available bandwidth during a congestion avoidance period, and an adaptive congestion window decrease scheme using timestamp base available bandwidth estimation (TABE) to cope with wireless channel errors. We simulate the proposed ER-TCP under various test scenarios using the ns-2 network simulator to verify its performance enhancement. Simulation results show that the proposal is a more suitable TCP than the several TCP variants under long delay and heavy loss probability environments of satellite networks.

We address the stability property of the FAST TCP congestion control algorithm. Based on a continuous-time dynamic model of the FAST TCP network, we establish that FAST TCP in itself is globally exponentially stable without any specific conditions on the congestion control parameter or the update gain. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the global exponential stability of FAST TCP.

In this letter, we propose an improved Droptail algorithm that introduces the random packet drop strategy. Our theoretical analysis and experiments prove that the improved Droptail can match the most performance of AQM algorithms in stabilizing the TCP system and solving the global synchronization problem, while significantly reducing the complexity of the router control. This fact shows that our algorithm is superior to the most popular AQM algorithms such as RED, PI, etc.

Per-flow unfairness of TCP throughput in the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) environment has been reported in past literature. A number of researchers have proposed various methods for alleviating the unfairness; most require modification of MAC protocols or queue management mechanisms in access points. However, the MAC protocols of access points are generally implemented at hardware level, so changing these protocols is costly. As the first contribution of this paper, we propose a transport-layer solution for alleviating unfairness among TCP flows, requiring a small modification to TCP congestion control mechanisms only on WLAN stations. In the past literature on fairness issues in the Internet flows, the performance of the proposed solutions for alleviating the unfairness has been evaluated separately from the network bandwidth utilization, meaning that they did not consider the trade-off relationships between fairness and bandwidth utilization. Therefore, as the second contribution of this paper, we introduce a novel performance metric for evaluating trade-off relationships between per-flow fairness and bandwidth utilization at the network bottleneck. We confirm the fundamental characteristics of the proposed method through simulation experiments and evaluate the performance of the proposed method through experiments in real WLAN environments. We show that the proposed method can achieve better a trade-off between fairness and bandwidth utilization, regardless of vendor implementations of wireless access points and wireless interface cards.

The safety applications for cooperative driving in VANETs, typically require the dissemination of safety-related information to all vehicles with high reliability and a strict timeline. However, due to the high vehicle mobility, dynamic traffic density, and a self-organized network, Safety message dissemination has a special challenge to efficiently use the limited network resources to satisfy its requirements. With this motivation, we propose a novel broadcasting protocol referred to as congestion awareness multi-hop broadcasting (CAMB) based loosely on a TDMA-like transmission scheduling scheme. The proposed protocol was evaluated using different traffic scenarios within both a realistic channel model and an 802.11p PHY/MAC model in our simulation. The simulation results showed that the performance of our CAMB protocol was better than those of the existing broadcasting protocols in terms of channel access delay, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and network overhead.

In this paper, we reveal inherent robustness issues of XCP (eXplicit Control Protocol), and propose extensions to XCP for increasing its robustness. XCP has been proposed as an efficient transport-layer protocol for wide-area and high-speed network. XCP is a transport-layer protocol that performs congestion control based on explicit feedback from routers. In the literature, many performance studies of XCP have been performed. However, the effect of traffic dynamics on the XCP performance has not been fully investigated. In this paper, through simulation experiments, we first show that XCP has the following problems: (1) the bottleneck link utilization is lowered against XCP traffic dynamics, and (2) operation of XCP becomes unstable in a network with both XCP and non-XCP traffic. We then propose XCP-IR (XCP with Increased Robustness) that operates efficiently even for dynamic XCP and non-XCP traffic.

In this letter, we propose three algorithms to reduce congestion for greedy forwarding, which is one of common principles in geographic routing. The new algorithms take geographic position information and network congestion metrics to balance traffic. When these algorithms are combined with well-known GPSR protocol [1], packet delivery ratio is enhanced by reducing number of lost packets in a buffer. In addition, end-to-end delay is reduced by bypassing congested nodes. These features are evaluated and analyzed through several simulation results.

With the emergence of bandwidth-greedy application services, high-speed transport protocols are expected to effectively and aggressively use large amounts of bandwidth in current broadband and multimedia networks. However, when high-speed transport protocols compete with other standard TCP flows, they can occupy most of the available bandwidth leading to disruption of service. To deploy high-speed transport protocols on the Internet, such unfair situations must be improved. In this paper, therefore, we propose a method to improve fairness, called Kyushu-TCP (KTCP), which introduces a non-aggressive period in the congestion avoidance phase to give other standard TCP flows more chances of increasing their transmission rates. This method improves fairness in terms of the throughput by estimating the stably available bandwidth-delay product and adjusting its transmission rate based on this estimation. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method through simulations.

We present a congestion control algorithm for the Internet and assess its stability. The algorithm has low operation complexity and exercises control over sources without keeping per-flow information. Given the lack of support for explicit-rate feedback in the Internet, we discuss an implementation where feedback is based on explicit binary indications. We assess the stability through a discrete-time model and present simulation results showing the efficacy of the algorithm. The obtained results indicate that when the algorithm is used to control sources that support explicit binary feedback, its stability is not affected and its performance is close to that obtained with sources that support explicit-rate feedback.

This letter proposes a dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm for access networks based PON (Passive Optical Network). It considers the mixture of transport layer protocols when responding to traffic congestion at the SNI (Service Node Interface). Simulations on a mixture of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) traffic flows show that the algorithm increases the throughput of TCP, improves the fairness between the two protocols, and solves the congestion problem at the SNI.

We consider a single-link multi-source network with FAST TCP sources. We adopt a continuous-time dynamic model for FAST TCP sources, and propose a static model to adequately describe the queuing delay dynamics at the link. The proposed model turns out to have a structure that reveals the time-varying network feedback delay, which allows us to analyze FAST TCP with due consideration of the time-varying network feedback delay. Based on the proposed model, we establish sufficient conditions for the boundedness of congestion window of each source and for the global asymptotic stability. The asymptotic stability condition shows that the stability property of each source is affected by all other sources sharing the link. Simulation results illustrate the validity of the sufficient condition for the global asymptotic stability.

In this paper, an effective congestion control algorithm is proposed to increase the end-to-end delivery success ratio of upstream traffic by reduction of buffer drop probabilities and their deviation in wireless sensor networks. According to the queue length of parent and child nodes, each child node chooses one of the parents as the next hop to the sink and controls the delay before transmission begins. It balances traffics among parents and mitigates congestion based on congestion level of a node. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces buffer drop probabilities and their deviation and increases the end-to-end delivery success ratio in wireless sensor networks.