Target bandwidth sharing using endhost measures

Recent congestion control protocols such as XCP and RCP achieve fair bandwidth sharing, high utilization, small queue sizes and nearly zero packet loss by implementing an explicit bandwidth share mechanism in the network routers. This paper develops new quantitative techniques for achieving the same results using only end-host measures. We develop new methods of computing bottleneck link characteristics, a new technique for sharing bandwidth fairly with Reno flows, and a new approach for rapidly converging to bandwidth share. A new transport protocol, TCP-Madison, that employs the new bandwidth sharing techniques is also defined in the paper. Experiments comparing TCP-Madison with FAST TCP, BIC-TCP and TCP-Reno over hundreds of PlanetLab and other live Internet paths show that the new protocol achieves the stated bandwidth sharing properties, is easily configured for near-optimal performance over all paths, and significantly outperforms the previous protocols.