Congestion Avoidance –DECBit

CONGESTION AVOIDANCE –DECBit

TCP repeatedly increases the load it imposes on the network in an effort to find the point at which Congestion occurs, and then it backs off from this point. Said another way, TCP needs to create losses to find the available bandwidth of the connection. An appealing alternative, but one that has not yet been widely adopted, is to predict when congestion is about to happen and then to reduce the rate at which hosts send data just before packets start being discarded. We call such a strategy congestion avoidance, to distinguish it from congestion control.

This section describes three different congestion-avoidance mechanisms. The first two take a similar approach: They put a small amount of additional functionality into the router to assist the end node in the anticipation of congestion. The third mechanism is very different from the first two: It attempts to avoid congestion purely from the end nodes.

The first mechanism was developed for use on the Digital Network Architecture (DNA),a connectionless network with a connection-oriented transport protocol. This mechanism could, therefore, also be applied to TCP and IP. This notification is implemented by setting a binary congestion bit in the packets that flow through the router; hence the name DECbit. The destination host then copies this congestion bit into the ACK it sends backto the source. Finally, the source adjusts its sending rate so as to avoid congestion.

A single congestion bit is added to the packet header. A router sets this bit in a packet if its Average queue length is greater than or equal to 1 at the time the packet arrives. This average queue length is measured over a time interval that spans the last busy+idle cycle, plus the current busy cycle. (The router is busy when it is transmitting and idle when it is not.) Figure 6.14 shows the queue length at a router as a function of time. Essentially, the router calculates the area under the curve and divides this value by the time interval to compute the average queue length. Using a queue length of 1 as the trigger for setting the congestion bit is a trade-off between significant queuing(and hence higher throughput) and increased idle time (and hence lower delay). In other words, a queue length of 1 seems to optimize the power function.