In-network congestion control toward enhanced network resource utilization

As the Internet becomes larger scaled and more diversified, the traditional end-to-end (E2E) congestion control faces various problems. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion control architecture, called in-network congestion control (NCC). Specifically, by introducing one or more nodes (NCC nodes) on an E2E network path, we divide the network path into multiple sub-paths and maintain a congestion-control feedback loop on each sub-path. In each sub-path, a specialized congestion control algorithm can be applied according to its network characteristics. This architecture can provide various advantages compared with the traditional E2E congestion control, such as higher data transmission throughput, better per-flow fairness, and incremental deployment nature. In this paper, we describe NCC’s advantages and challenges, and clarify its potential performance by numerical evaluation results.