Keith Winstein, Hari Balakrishnan
SIGCOMM, Hong Kong, , August 2013
This paper describes a new approach to end-to-end congestion control
on a multi-user network. Rather than manually formulate each
endpoint's reaction to congestion signals, as in traditional
protocols, we developed a program called Remy that generates
congestion-control algorithms to run at the endpoints.
In this approach, the protocol designer specifies their prior
knowledge or assumptions about the network and an objective that the
algorithm will try to achieve, e.g., high throughput and low
queueing delay. Remy then produces a distributed algorithm---the
control rules for the independent endpoints---that tries to achieve
this objective.
In simulations with ns-2, Remy-generated algorithms
outperformed human-designed end-to-end techniques, including TCP
Cubic, Compound, and Vegas. In many cases, Remy's algorithms also
outperformed methods that require intrusive in-network changes,
including XCP and Cubic-over-sfqCoDel (stochastic fair queueing with
CoDel for active queue management).
Remy can generate algorithms both for networks where some parameters
are known tightly a priori, e.g. datacenters, and for
networks where prior knowledge is less precise, such as cellular
networks. We characterize the sensitivity of the resulting
performance to the specificity of the prior knowledge, and the
consequences when real-world conditions contradict the assumptions
supplied at design-time.
[PDF (563KB)]
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{winstein2013tcp,
author = "Keith Winstein and Hari Balakrishnan",
title = "{TCP ex Machina: Computer-Generated Congestion Control}",
booktitle = {SIGCOMM},
year = {2013},
month = {August},
address = {Hong Kong, }
}