Achieving high throughput and TCP Reno fairness in delay-based TCP over large networks

The transport control protocol (TCP) has been widely used in wired and wireless Internet applications such as FTP, email and http. Numerous congestion avoidance algorithms have been proposed to improve the performance of TCP in various scenarios, especially for high speed and wireless networks. Although different algorithms may achieve different performance improvements under different network conditions, designing a congestion algorithm that can perform well across a wide spectrum of network conditions remains a great challenge. Delay-based TCP has a potential to overcome above challenges. However, the unfairness problem of delay-based TCP with TCP Reno blocks widely the deployment of delay-based TCP over wide area networks. In this paper, we proposed a novel delay-based congestion control algorithm, named FAST-FIT, which could perform gracefully in both ultra high speed networks and wide area networks, as well as keep graceful fairness with widely deployed TCP Reno hosts. FAST-FIT uses queuing delay as a primary input for controlling TCP congestion window. Packet loss is used as a secondary signal to adaptively adjust parameters of primary control process. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the performance of the algorithm is significantly improved as compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms, while maintaining good fairness.