Congestion control using efficient explicit feedback

This paper proposes a framework for congestion control, called Binary Marking Congestion Control (BMCC) for high bandwidth-delay product networks. The basic components of BMCC are i) a packet marking scheme for obtaining high resolution congestion estimates using the existing bits available in the IP header for Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and ii) a set of load-dependent control laws that use these congestion estimates to achieve efficient and fair bandwidth allocations on high bandwidth-delay product networks, while maintaining a low persistent queue length and negligible packet loss rate. We present analytical models that predict and provide insights into the convergence properties of the protocol. Using extensive packet-level simulations, we assess the efficacy of BMCC and perform comparisons with several proposed schemes. BMCC outperforms VCP, MLCP, XCP, SACK+RED/ECN and in some cases RCP, in terms of average flow completion times for typical Internet flow sizes.