Paper review : Dynamic Behavior of Slowly-Responsive Congestion Control Algorithms (BBFS01)

• Goal
  The paper investigate the question of whether the slowly-responsive algorithms are safe to deploy in the public Internet, hence move the Internet from an "only-TCP" paradigm to a TCP-compatible paradigm.

• Contribution
  The existed TCP-compatiblity criteria consider only the static condition of a fixed loss rate. This paper investigate the behavior of slowly-responsive, TCP-compatible congestion control algorithms under more realistic dynamic network conditions.
  

• Main ideas
  • Most of the TCP-compatible algorithms appear to be safe for deployment according to their behavior under dynamic conditions, which includes persistent packet loss rates, long/short term fairness, bottleneck link utilization, and smoothness of transmission rates.
  • Incorporating the principle of packet conservation is crucial in dynamic settings to ensure safety.
  • Smoother transmissions is a tradeoff of the long-term throughput.

• Evaluation
  • Significance rating: 3
    This paper give a positive answer to the question of incorporating the slowly-responsive algorithms to the current Internet by investigating the dynamic properties of them. The arguments here is important since normally only static properties of this kind of algorithms are concerned by the designer. (3)
    

  • Convincing rating
    The authors use simulation and analysis to evaluate the behavior of several TCP-compatible congestion control mechanisms under dynamic confitions. Based on the results, they verify some of their conclusions (e.g. packet conservation is critical for ensuring safety) in further simulations.

  • Limitation
    There are other dynamic properties besides the ones considered in this paper can serve as the evaluation metric.

• Conclusion
  The authors consider more factors of compatible algorithms than the common static meaning, while this is a good supply for the traditional analysis.

  10/8/01