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EE 122:TCP Congestion Control Ion Stoica
TAs: Junda Liu, DK Moon, David Zats
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee122/(Materials with thanks to Vern Paxson, Jennifer Rexford,
and colleagues at UC Berkeley)
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Goals of Today’s Lecture
Principles of congestion control Learning that congestion is occurring Adapting to alleviate the congestion
TCP congestion control Additive-increase, multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) How to begin transmitting: Slow Start
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What We Know
We know: How to process packets in a switch How to route packets in the network How to send packets reliably
We don’t know: How fast to send
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It’s Not Just The Sender & Receiver
Flow control keeps one fast sender from overwhelming a slow receiver
Congestion control keeps a set of senders from overloading the network
Three congestion control problems: Adjusting to bottleneck bandwidth
Without any a priori knowledge Could be a Gbps link; could be a modem
Adjusting to variations in bandwidth Sharing bandwidth between flows
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Congestion is Unavoidable Two packets arrive at the same time
The node can only transmit one … and either buffers or drops the other
If many packets arrive in a short period of time The node cannot keep up with the arriving traffic … and the buffer may eventually overflow
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Congestion Collapse Definition: Increase in network load results in a decrease of
useful work done Due to:
Undelivered packets Packets consume resources and are dropped later in
network Spurious retransmissions of packets still in flight
Unnecessary retransmissions lead to more load! Pouring gasoline on a fire
Mid-1980s: Internet grinds to a halt Until Jacobson/Karels (Berkeley!) devise TCP congestion
control
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View from a Single Flow Knee – point after which
Throughput increases very slowly
Delay increases quickly
Cliff – point after which Throughput starts to
decrease very fast to zero (congestion collapse)
Delay approaches infinity
Load
Load
Thro
ughp
utD
elay
knee cliff
congestioncollapse
packetloss
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General Approaches
Send without care Many packet drops
(1) Reservations Pre-arrange bandwidth allocations Requires negotiation before sending packets Low utilization
(2) Pricing Don’t drop packets for the high-bidders Requires payment model
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General Approaches (cont’d)
(3) Dynamic Adjustment Probe network to test level of congestion Speed up when no congestion Slow down when congestion Suboptimal, messy dynamics, simple to implement
All three techniques have their place But for generic Internet usage, dynamic adjustment is
the most appropriate Due to pricing structure, traffic characteristics, and
good citizenship
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TCP Congestion Control
TCP connection has window Controls number of unacknowledged packets
Sending rate: ~Window/RTT
Vary window size to control sending rate
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Sizing the Windows cwnd (Congestion Windows)
How many bytes can be sent without overflowing routers
Computed by congestion control algorithm
AdvertisedWindow How many bytes can be sent without
overflowing the sender Determined by the receiver
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EffectiveWindow Limits how much data can be in transit Implemented as # of bytes Described as # packets (segments) in this
lecture
EffectiveWindow = MaxWindow – (LastByteSent – LastByteAcked)
MaxWindow = min(cwnd, AdvertisedWindow)
LastByteAckedLastByteSent
sequence number increases
MaxWindow
EffectiveWindow
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Two Basic Components
Detecting congestion
Rate adjustment algorithm Depends on congestion or not Three subproblems within adjustment problem
Finding fixed bandwidth Adjusting to bandwidth variations Sharing bandwidth
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Detecting Congestion Packet dropping is best sign of congestion
Delay-based methods are hard and risky
How do you detect packet drops? ACKs TCP uses ACKs to signal receipt of data ACK denotes last contiguous byte received
Actually, ACKs indicate next segment expected
Two signs of packet drops No ACK after certain time interval: time-out Several duplicate ACKs (ignore for now)
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Rate Adjustment
Basic structure: Upon receipt of ACK (of new data): increase rate Upon detection of loss: decrease rate
But what increase/decrease functions should we use? Depends on what problem we are solving
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Problem #1: Single Flow, Fixed BW
Want to get a first-order estimate of the available bandwidth Assume bandwidth is fixed Ignore presence of other flows
Want to start slow, but rapidly increase rate until packet drop occurs (“slow-start”)
Adjustment: cwnd initially set to 1 cwnd++ upon receipt of ACK
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Slow-Start cwnd increases exponentially: cwnd doubles every
time a full cwnd of packets has been sent Each ACK releases two packets Slow-start is called “slow” because of starting point
segment 1cwnd = 1
cwnd = 2 segment 2segment 3
cwnd = 4 segment 4
segment 5segment 6segment 7
cwnd = 8
cwnd = 3
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5 Minute Break
Questions Before We Proceed?
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Problems with Slow-Start
Slow-start can result in many losses Roughly the size of cwnd ~ BW*RTT
Example: At some point, cwnd is enough to fill “pipe” After another RTT, cwnd is double its previous value All the excess packets are dropped!
Need a more gentle adjustment algorithm once have rough estimate of bandwidth
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Problem #2: Single Flow, Varying BW
Want to be able to track available bandwidth, oscillating around its current value
Possible variations: (in terms of RTTs) Multiplicative increase or decrease: cwnd a*cwnd Additive increase or decrease: cwnd cwnd + b
Four alternatives: AIAD: gentle increase, gentle decrease AIMD: gentle increase, drastic decrease MIAD: drastic increase, gentle decrease (too many losses) MIMD: drastic increase and decrease
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Problem #3: Multiple Flows
Want steady state to be “fair”
Many notions of fairness, but here all we require is that two identical flows end up with the same bandwidth
This eliminates MIMD and AIAD
AIMD is the only remaining solution!
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Buffer and Window Dynamics
No congestion x increases by one packet/RTT every RTT Congestion decrease x by factor 2
A BC = 50 pkts/RTT
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
1 28 55 82 109
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190
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244
271
298
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379
406
433
460
487
Backlog in router (pkts)Congested if > 20
Rate (pkts/RTT)
x
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AIMD Sharing DynamicsA Bx1
D E
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
1 28 55 82 109
136
163
190
217
244
271
298
325
352
379
406
433
460
487
No congestion rate increases by one packet/RTT every RTT Congestion decrease rate by factor 2
Rates equalize fair share
x2
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AIAD Sharing Dynamics
A Bx1
D E No congestion x increases by one packet/RTT every RTT Congestion decrease x by 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
1 28 55 82 109
136
163
190
217
244
271
298
325
352
379
406
433
460
487
x2
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Efficient Allocation: Challenges of Congestion Control Too slow
Fail to take advantage of available bandwidth underload
Too fast Overshoot knee overload,
high delay, loss Everyone’s doing it
May all under/over shoot large oscillations
Optimal: xi=Xgoal
Efficiency = 1 - distance from efficiency line
User 1: x1U
ser 2
: x2
Efficiencyline
2 user example
overload
underload
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Example
User 1: x1
Use
r 2: x
2
fairnessline
efficiencyline
1
1
Total bandwidth 1
Inefficient: x1+x2=0.7
(0.2, 0.5)
Congested: x1+x2=1.2
(0.7, 0.5)
Efficient: x1+x2=1Not fair
(0.7, 0.3)
Efficient: x1+x2=1Fair
(0.5, 0.5)
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MIAD
User 1: x1
Use
r 2: x
2
fairnessline
efficiencyline
(x1h,x2h)
(x1h-aD,x2h-aD)
(bI(x1h-aD), bI(x2h-aD)) Increase: x*bI
Decrease: x - aD
Does not converge to fairness
Does not converges to efficiency
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AIAD
User 1: x1
Use
r 2: x
2
fairnessline
efficiencyline
(x1h,x2h)
(x1h-aD,x2h-aD)
(x1h-aD+aI),x2h-aD+aI)) Increase: x + aI
Decrease: x - aD
Does not converge to fairness
Does not converge to efficiency
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MIMD
User 1: x1
Use
r 2: x
2
fairnessline
efficiencyline
(x1h,x2h)
(bdx1h,bdx2h)
(bIbDx1h,bIbDx2h)
Increase: x*bI
Decrease: x*bD
Does not converge to fairness
Converges to efficiency iff
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D
I
bb
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(bDx1h+aI,bDx2h+aI)
AIMD
User 1: x1
Use
r 2: x
2
fairnessline
efficiencyline
(x1h,x2h)
(bDx1h,bDx2h)
Increase: x+aD
Decrease: x*bD
Converges to fairness Converges to
efficiency Increments smaller
as fairness increases
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Implementing AIMD
After each ACK Increment cwnd by 1/cwnd (cwnd += 1/cwnd) As a result, cwnd is increased by one only if all
segments in a cwnd have been acknowledged
But need to decide when to leave slow-start and enter AIMD Use ssthresh variable
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Slow Start/AIMD PseudocodeInitially:
cwnd = 1;ssthresh = infinite;
New ack received:if (cwnd < ssthresh) /* Slow Start*/ cwnd = cwnd + 1;else /* Congestion Avoidance */ cwnd = cwnd + 1/cwnd;
Timeout:/* Multiplicative decrease */ssthresh = cwnd/2;cwnd = 1;
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The big picture (with timeouts)
Time
cwnd
Timeout
SlowStart
AIMD
ssthresh
Timeout
SlowStart
SlowStart
AIMD
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Summary Congestion is inevitable
Internet does not reserve resources in advance TCP actively tries to grab capacity
Congestion control critical for avoiding collapse AIMD: Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease Congestion detected via packet loss (fail-safe) Slow start to find initial sending rate & to restart after
timeout Next class
Advanced congestion control