End-to-End Congestion Control for High Speed Networks Based on Population Ecology Models

Abstract

Since TCP congestion control is ill-suited for high speed networks, designing a replacement for TCP has become a challenge. To address this problem, we extend the population ecology theory to design a novel congestion control algorithm. We treat the network flows as the species in nature, the throughput of the flows as the population number, and the bottleneck bandwidth as the food resources. Then we use the key idea of constructing population ecology models to develop a novel congestion control model, and implement the corresponding end-to-end transport protocol through measurement, which called Population Ecology TCP (PE-TCP). The theoretical analysis and simulation results validate that PE-TCP achieves high utilization, fast convergence, fair bandwidth allocation, and near-zero packet drops. These qualities are desirable for high speed networks.