Incremental deployment of new ECN-compatible congestion control

Congestion control can be improved by using more accurate congestion feedback from the network. However, when new protocols either do not obtain information from all congested network elements, or share resources with existing congestion control protocols, it is possible for one or other to obtain unfairly low throughput. This paper investigates the performance of Binary Marking Congestion Control when deployed in conjunction with SACK and Drop-Tail or ECN routers. We propose and evaluate solutions that allow for a fairer bandwidth sharing between BMCC and SACK flows in these cases. The proposed solutions can also applied to other protocols which use explicit feedback from the network.