Delay-based congestion control for multipath TCP

With the aid of multipath transport protocols, a multihomed host can shift some of its traffic from more congested paths to less congested ones, thus compensating for lost bandwidth on some paths by moderately increasing transmission rates on other ones. However, existing multipath proposals achieve only coarse-grained load balancing due to a rough estimate of network congestion using packet losses. This paper formulates the problem of multipath congestion control and proposes an approximate iterative algorithm to solve it. We prove that a fair and efficient traffic shifting implies that every flow strives to equalize the extent of congestion that it perceives on all its available paths.We call this result “Congestion Equality Principle”. By instantiating the approximate iterative algorithm, we develop weighted Vegas (wVegas), a delay-based algorithm for multipath congestion control, which uses packet queuing delay as congestion signals, thus achieving fine-grained load balancing. Our simulations show that, compared with loss-based algorithms, wVegas is more sensitive to changes of network congestion and thus achieves more timely traffic shifting and quicker convergence. Additionally, as it occupies fewer link buffers, wVegas rarely causes packet losses and shows better intra-protocol fairness.