TCP congestion control schemes
Since the publication of two end-to-end congestion control schemes at SIGCOMM’88 [Jac88] [RJ88], congestion control has been a very popular and important topic in the scientific community. The IETF tried to mandate a standard TCP congestion control scheme that would be used by all TCP implementations RFC 5681, but today’s TCP implementations contain different congestions control schemes. Linux supports different congestion control schemes that can be configured by the system administrator. A detailed analysis of these implementations was presented recently in [CGPP12] Windows has opted for their own congestion control scheme that is included in the microsoft stack.
Given the importance of the congestion control scheme from a performance viewpoint, it is useful to have a detailed overview of the different congestion control schemes that have been proposed and evaluated. The best survey paper on TCP congestion control is probably the paper written by Alexander Afanasyev and his colleagues on Host-to-Host Congestion Control for TCP [ATRK10] and that appeared in IEEE Communications Surveys and tutorials. This paper provides a detailed overview of the different TCP congestion control schemes and classifies them.
Last week, I received an alert from google scholar indicating that a new survey on TCP congestion control appeared in the Journal of Network and Computer Applications. This paper tries to provide a classification of the different TCP congestion control schemes. Unfortunately, the paper is not convincing at all and furthermore it reuses two of the figures published in [ATRK10] without citing this previously published survey. This is a form of plagiarism that should have been detected by the editors of the Journal of Network and Computer Applications
| [ATRK10] | (1, 2) Alexander Afanasyev, Neil Tilley, Peter Reiher, and Leonard Kleinrock. Host-to-Host Congestion Control for TCP. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 12(3):304–342, 2010. |
| [CGPP12] | C Callegari, S Giordano, M Pagano, and T Pepe. Behavior analysis of TCP Linux variants. Computer Networks, 56(1):462–476, January 2012. |
| [Jac88] | V. Jacobson. Congestion avoidance and control. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, volume 18, 314–329. ACM, 1988. |
| [RJ88] | KK Ramakrishnan and R. Jain. A binary feedback scheme for congestion avoidance in computer networks with a connectionless network layer. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, volume 18, 303–313. ACM, 1988. |