Erasure Coding-Based Non-Conservative Network Communication: A Ground Up Approach

Erasure coding has been studied for network communications due to various advantages over retransmission. Many prior works have discussed how to integrate erasure coding into existing communication protocols. However, as the congestion control mechanisms inherent to these established protocols were not natively designed for coded flows, the potential of erasure coding may not be fully realized. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits of incorporating erasure coding into congestion control design. We explore a communication protocol that is built from the ground up with erasure coding, named Coding-based Non-conservative Communication Protocol (CNCP). CNCP adopts hop-by-hop congestion control and distinguishes itself from traditional conservative flow enforcement by accommodating non-conservative flows. To address potential issues associated with non-conservative flows, such as increased congestion and queue instability, CN CP utilizes a specific queuing design and packet deletion strategy at intermediate network nodes. Our analysis reveals that non-conservative flows do not undermine fairness and may expedite convergence towards optimal network utilization. Furthermore, we develop a hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism based on primal-dual method, specifically tailored for non-conservative flows in CNCP. Through simulations, we show that combining erasure coding and non-conservative flow control can significantly enhance network communication performance under dynamic network conditions.