BBR': an implementation of bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip time congestion control for ns-3

Abstract

The dominant Internet protocol, TCP, does not work as well as it could over the wide-variety of networks facing today's applications. Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip time (BBR) congestion control has been proposed as an improvement, with the promise of higher throughputs and lower delays as compared to other TCP congestion control algorithms. While BBR has been implemented for Linux, unfortunately, there is not yet an implementation for ns-3, a powerful, flexible and popular simulator used for network research. This paper presents BBR', an implementation of BBR for ns-3. BBR' extends ns-3 in a fashion similar to other TCP congestion control algorithms, re-using existing interconnection mechanisms and making BBR' extensible. Preliminary validation shows BBR' behaves and performs similarly to BBR, and preliminary performance evaluation shows BBR' has similar throughputs but significantly lower round-trip times than CUBIC in some wired and 4G LTE wireless scenarios.