Relentless Congestion Control

Relentless congestion control is a simple modification to AIMD congestion control: instead of halving cwnd after a loss, cwnd is reduced by the number of lost segments. It can be modeled as a strict implementation of Van Jacobson’s Packet Conservation Principle. Relentless congestion control has exactly unity gain, which is expected to make it much easier for network devices to accurately control traffic. Relentless Congestion Control is not TCP-friendly. It requires that the network allocates capacity through some technique that segregates the traffic into flows or classes and can send different congestion signals to each. Our goals are to illustrate some new protocol features and properties might be possible if we relax the TCP-friendly paradigm, and to create opportunities for deploying for these new algorithm in the Internet.