Towards provably performant congestion control

Authors: 

Anup Agarwal, Carnegie Mellon University; Venkat Arun, University of Texas at Austin; Devdeep Ray, Ruben Martins, and Srinivasan Seshan, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract: 

We seek to ease the design of congestion control algorithms (CCAs) that provably perform well under diverse network scenarios including, cellular links, policers, token bucket filters, operating system jitter, etc. Guaranteeing performance under such conditions is hard as it requires considering combinatorial possibilities of CCA and network interactions. We build a framework that allows us to reason about CCAs. It describes (1) the necessary actions that any performant CCA must take, and (2) a provably sufficient amount of information for CCAs to consider when deciding their sending rate. Combining this framework with techniques in formal methods, we synthesize CCAs that provably perform across a diverse set of network conditions. Our methodology also led us to discover and prove fundamental impossibility results.

NSDI '24 Open Access Sponsored by
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {295573,
author = {Anup Agarwal and Venkat Arun and Devdeep Ray and Ruben Martins and Srinivasan Seshan},
title = {Towards provably performant congestion control},
booktitle = {21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 24)},
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-1-939133-39-7},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {951--978},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi24/presentation/agarwal-anup},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr
}