TCP Congestion Control: A Systems Approach

TCP Congestion Control has been a research topic for over 30 years. Since the pioneering work of Jacobson and Karels in the 1980s, hundreds of researchers have sought to improve the avoidance and control of congestion in the Internet. Over time, new ideas such as using delay as well as packet loss to detect congestion have taken hold. This book walks through all the key approaches and gives the reader a framework to understand the big picture and ongoing challenges of congestion control.

Features

• Emphasizes underlying concepts, key principles and design choices.
• Covers developments in congestion control from its early days through to the latest innovations.
• Includes both host-based approaches and router-based techniques such as Random Early Detection.
• Describes methodologies used to evaluate new congestion control algorithms.

"Congestion control is unquestionably one of the most important, most fundamental topics in computer networking...The 'systems approach' that Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie have championed is exactly what is needed to truly understand congestion control, where deep, system-wide issues in network architecture come to the fore." – Jim Kurose, U. Mass Amherst.

Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of ComputerScience, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chairfrom 2003-2009. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and operation of Internet-scale distributed systems, including thewidely used PlanetLab and MeasurementLab platforms. He is currentlycontributing to the Aether access-edge cloud project at the OpenNetworking Foundation (ONF), where he serves as Chief Scientist.Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellowof the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE KobayashiComputer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACMSIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University.

Lawrence Brakmo currently works in the Kernel group at Facebook.Prior to joining Facebook, he was a member of the Host Networkinggroup at Google, and before that, a researcher and project manager ofthe OS group at DoCoMo USA Labs. Brakmo has worked on TCP enhancementsto improve network performance, including the design of the TCP Vegasand TCP-NV congestion control algorithms. He has also developed OStechniques to improve system reliability, performance, and energyconsumption. Brakmo received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science fromThe University of Arizona.

Bruce Davie is a computer scientist noted for his contributions tothe field of networking. He is a former VP and CTO for the AsiaPacific region at VMware. He joined VMware during the acquisition ofSoftware Defined Networking (SDN) startup Nicira. Prior to that, hewas a Fellow at Cisco Systems, leading a team of architectsresponsible for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Davie has over30 years of networking industry experience and has co-authored 17RFCs. He was recognized as an ACM Fellow in 2009 and chaired ACMSIGCOMM from 2009 to 2013. He was also a visiting lecturer at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. Davie is theauthor of multiple books and the holder of more than 40 U.S. Patents.