Charge-sensitive TCP and rate control in the internet.pdf

Charge-Sensitive TCP and Rate Control in theInternetRichard J. La and Venkat AnantharamDepartment of Electrical Engineering & Computer SciencesUniversity of California at Berkeleyfhyongla, ananthg@AbstractIn a communication network a good rate allocation algorithm should re ect the utilities ofthe users while being fair. We investigate this fundamental problem of achieving the systemoptimal rates in the sense of maximizing aggregate utility, in a distributed manner, using only theinformation available at the end hosts of the network. This is done by decomposing the overallsystem problem into subproblems for the network and for the individual users, by introducing apricing scheme. The users are to solve the problem of maximizing individual net utility, which isthe utility less the amount they pay. We provide algorithms for the network to adjust its pricesand the users to adjust their window sizes such that at an equilibrium the system optimum isachieved. Further, the equilibrium prices are such that the system optimum achieves weightedproportional fairness. It is notable that the update algorithms of the users do not require anyexplicit feedback from the network, rendering them easily deployable over the Internet. Ourscheme is incentive compatible in that there is no benet to the users to lie about their utilities. i 1 IntroductionAs the Internet explodes in size and in the number of users, one of challenging questions networkdesigners face is how to provide a fair and ecient allocation of the available bandwidth. To thisend researchers have proposed many dierent rate allocation mechanisms. In the current Internet,most connections use variants of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which is a window-based congestion control mechanism. It is widely recognized, however, that TCP does not generallylead to a fair or ecient allocation of bandwidth among the connections [3, 17, 5]. The fact thatthe Internet is now in the public domain, and thus in a potentially no