Slide Set 14 TCP Congestion Control.ppt

Slide Set 14: TCP Congestion Control In this set ... We begin Chapter 6 but with 6.3. We will cover Sections 6.3 and 6.4. Mainly deals with congestion control with TCP. Goal of TCP Congestion Control Goal of TCP is to determine the available network capacity and prevent network overload. Depends on other connections that share the resources. Typically, in discussions, First in First Out queues are assumed; however, congestion control mechanisms work with other queuing techniques (fair queuing) as well. Why prevent congestion ? Congestion is bad for the overall performance in the network. Excessive delays can be caused. Retransmissions may result due to dropped packets Waste of capacity and resources. In some cases (UDP) packet losses are not recovered from. Note: Main reason for lost packets in the Internet is due to congestion -- errors are rare. The Congestion Window In order to deal with congestion, a new state variable called “CongestionWindow” is maintained by the source. Limits the amount of data that it has in transit at a given time. MaxWindow = Min(Advertised Window, CongestionWindow) EffectiveWindow = MaxWindow - (LastByteSent -LastByteAcked). TCP sends no faster than what the slowest component -- the network or the destination host --can accommodate. Managing the Congestion Window Decrease window when TCP perceives high congestion. Increase window when TCP knows that there is not much congestion. How ? Since increased congestion is more catastrophic, reduce it more aggressively. Increase is additive, decrease is multiplicative -- called the Additive Increase/Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) behavior of TCP. AIMD details Each time congestion occurs - the congestion window is halved. Example, if current window is 16 segments and a time-out occurs (implies packet loss), reduce the window to 8. Finally window may be reduced to 1 segment. Window is not allowed to fall below 1 segment (MSS). For each congestion window worth of packets that has been sent out suc