TY - JOUR
T1 - Equilibrium of heterogeneous congestion control
T2 - Optimality and stability
AU - Tang, Ao
AU - Wei, Xiaoliang
AU - Low, Steven H.
AU - Chiang, Mung
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received September 23, 2007; revised June 28, 2008 and July 28, 2009; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor S. Shakkottai. First published December 01, 2009; current version published June 16, 2010. The research is supported by the NSF under Grants CCF-0835706 and CNS-0519880, the DARPA under Grant HR0011–06–1–0008, the ARO, and the Caltech Lee Center for Advanced Networking.
PY - 2010/6
Y1 - 2010/6
N2 - When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals share the same network, the current theory based on utility maximization fails to predict the network behavior. The pricing signals can be different types of signals such as packet loss, queueing delay, etc, or different values of the same type of signal such as different ECN marking values based on the same actual link congestion level. Unlike in a homogeneous network, the bandwidth allocation now depends on router parameters and flow arrival patterns. It can be non-unique, suboptimal and unstable. In Tang (Equilibrium of heterogeneous congestion control: Existence and uniqueness, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 824837, Aug. 2007), existence and uniqueness of equilibrium of heterogeneous protocols are investigated. This paper extends the study with two objectives: analyzing the optimality and stability of such networks and designing control schemes to improve those properties. First, we demonstrate the intricate behavior of a heterogeneous network through simulations and present a framework to help understand its equilibrium properties. Second, we propose a simple source-based algorithm to decouple bandwidth allocation from router parameters and flow arrival patterns by only updating a linear parameter in the sources' algorithms on a slow timescale. It steers a network to the unique optimal equilibrium. The scheme can be deployed incrementally as the existing protocol needs no change and only new protocols need to adopt the slow timescale adaptation.
AB - When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals share the same network, the current theory based on utility maximization fails to predict the network behavior. The pricing signals can be different types of signals such as packet loss, queueing delay, etc, or different values of the same type of signal such as different ECN marking values based on the same actual link congestion level. Unlike in a homogeneous network, the bandwidth allocation now depends on router parameters and flow arrival patterns. It can be non-unique, suboptimal and unstable. In Tang (Equilibrium of heterogeneous congestion control: Existence and uniqueness, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 824837, Aug. 2007), existence and uniqueness of equilibrium of heterogeneous protocols are investigated. This paper extends the study with two objectives: analyzing the optimality and stability of such networks and designing control schemes to improve those properties. First, we demonstrate the intricate behavior of a heterogeneous network through simulations and present a framework to help understand its equilibrium properties. Second, we propose a simple source-based algorithm to decouple bandwidth allocation from router parameters and flow arrival patterns by only updating a linear parameter in the sources' algorithms on a slow timescale. It steers a network to the unique optimal equilibrium. The scheme can be deployed incrementally as the existing protocol needs no change and only new protocols need to adopt the slow timescale adaptation.
KW - Congestion control
KW - Heterogeneous protocols
KW - Optimal allocation
KW - Stability
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U2 - 10.1109/TNET.2009.2034963
DO - 10.1109/TNET.2009.2034963
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77953687822
VL - 18
SP - 844
EP - 857
JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
SN - 1063-6692
IS - 3
M1 - 5342450
ER -