Embracing Packet Loss in Congestion Control

Loss avoidance has long been central to the Internet architecture. Ordinarily, dropped packets represent wasted resources. In this paper, we study whether the benefits of a network architecture that embraces—rather than avoids— widespread packet loss outweigh the potential loss in efficiency. We propose an alternative approach to Internet congestion control called decongestion control. In a departure from traditional approaches, end hosts strive to transmit packets faster than the network can deliver them, leveraging end-to-end erasure coding and in-network fairness enforcement. We argue that such an approach may decrease the complexity of routers while increasing stability, robustness, and tolerance for misbehavior. While a number of important design issues remain open, we show that our approach not only avoids congestion collapse, but delivers near optimal steady-state goodput for a variety of traffic demands in three different backbone topologies.