Paper Review:
Congestion Avoidance and Control
Reviewer: Robert Dugas
Problem
This paper addresses the issue of how to optomize TCP in order to maximize
bandwidth and efficiently deal with congestion.
Contribution
The primary contribution is twofold. The first aspect is Jacobsen's identification
of faults in the current (pre 1988) version of TCP. The second is the array of 7
improvements presented for new TCP.
Main Ideas
A robust protocol should observe 'conservation of packets'.
Start slow to decrease chance of initial (and then continuous) congestion.
Account for variance when evaluating RTT to avoid useless retransmits.
Employ linear increase and exponential backoff to allow for unclogging.
Critique
Significance:4
Many of the ideas in this paper appear to be implementations of other ideas
floating around in academia. However, realizing what to pull from where
and why it needs to be used was a major step forward for internet communications
Methodology:
While the paper is largely theoretical (usually referencing other paper for
'further details') the authors do present graphs at the end. These graphs analyze the
retransmition rate, the round-trip time estimator, and the bandwidth usage of 8 machines
at LBL and UCB sharing a 230.4 Kbps link.
Limitation:
TCP V4.3 represented a great leap forward in the evolution of the protocol. Further
improvements, however, have since been made and some future work the authors hint
at is implementation of fairness enforcement and early congestion detection
at the gateway level.
Lessons:
The primarly lessons presented in this paper are the notion of packet
conservation, and the necessity of slow start and exponential backoff controls.