Hybrid congestion control for high-speed networks

Nowadays, more and more applications require fast transfer of massive data over networks, and the emergence of high-speed networks provides an ideal solution to this challenge. Due to the limitations of the conservative congestion control algorithm, the standard TCP is no longer appropriate for highspeed networks to efficiently utilize the bandwidth resources. Therefore, several high-speed TCP variants have been suggested to conquer the problem. However, although these protocols perform successfully to improve the bandwidth utilization, they still have the weakness on the performance such as RTT-fairness, TCP-friendliness, etc. In this paper, we propose HCC TCP, a hybrid congestion control algorithm using the synergy of delay-based and loss-based approach for the adaptation to high speed and long distance network environment. The algorithm uses queuing delay as the primary congestion indicator, and adjusts the window to stabilize around the size which can achieve the full utilization of available bandwidth. On the other hand, it uses packet loss as the second congestion indicator, and a loss-based congestion control strategy is utilized to maintain high bandwidth utilization in the cases that the delay-based strategy performs inefficiently in the networks. The two approaches in the algorithm are dynamically transferred into each other according to the network status. We finally perform simulations to verify the properties of the proposed HCC TCP. The simulation results demonstrate HCC TCP satisfies the requirements for an ideal TCP variant in high-speed networks, and achieves efficient performance on throughput, fairness, TCP-friendliness, robustness, etc. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.