Hierarchical Congestion Control (HCC): Cooperation of Uncorrelated Flows for Better Fairness and Throughput

Congestion control protocols face several challenges for achieving max-min fairness and high throughput. First, each flow has a limited view of the network state. In the absence of a centralized congestion control entity, coordination is left (directly or indirectly) to individual flows. Second, most flows are very volatile by nature: flow rates/demands change significantly from one instant to another. In this poster, we present a hierarchical congestion control scheme to tackle these challenges. We aggregate flows with low correlation in a hierarchical manner, and recursively compute and allocate rates to these flows. Our preliminary experimental results show significant promise in terms of fairness and throughput.