Internet Congestion Control Census

The Internet has recently been evolving from homogeneous congestion control to heterogeneous congestion control. Several years ago, Internet traffic was mainly controlled by the standard TCP AIMD algorithm, whereas Internet traffic is now controlled by many different TCP congestion control algorithms, such as AIMD, BIC, CUBIC, CTCP, HSTCP, HTCP, HYBLA, ILLINOIS, LP, STCP, VEGAS, VENO, WESTWOOD+, and YEAH. However, there is very little work on the performance and stability study of the Internet with heterogeneous congestion control. One fundamental reason is the lack of the deployment information of different TCP algorithms. The goals of this project are to

• 1) develop tools for identifying the TCP algorithms in the Internet, and
• 2) conduct large-scale TCP-algorithm measurements in the Internet.

TCP Algorithm Identification Tools:

• CAAI

Measurement Results:

• Results of the top 5000 web sites (according to Alexa) in February 2011:
• Only 16.85~25.58% of web servers still use the traditional AIMD.
• 14.36%, 15.82%, and 14.33% of web servers use BIC, CUBIC' (kernel 2.6.25 and before), and CUBIC (kernel 2.6.26 and after), respectively. Total = 44.51%.
• 9.97% and 0.30~9.03% of web servers use CTCP' (Windows Server 2003 and XP Pro x64) and CTCP (Windows Server 2008, Vista, and 7), respectively. Total = 10.27~19%.
• Surprisingly, some web servers use non-default TCP algorithms (such as YEAH), some web servers use some unknown TCP algorithms which are not available in any major operating system family, and some web servers use abnormal slow start algorithms.
• For more information, please read our ICDCS'11 paper.

Selected Publications:

• Peng Yang, and Lisong Xu, "A Survey of Deployment Information of Delay-based TCP Congestion Avoidance Algorithm for Transmitting Multimedia Data", in Proceedings of IEEE GLOBECOM Workshop on Multimedia Communications & Services, Houston, TX, December 2011
• Peng Yang, Wen Luo, Lisong Xu, Jitender Deogun, and Ying Lu, "TCP Congestion Avoidance Algorithm Identification", in Proceedings of IEEE ICDCS, Minneapolis, MN, June 2011
• Peng Yang, Wen Luo, and Lisong Xu, "Towards Measuring the Deployment Information of Different TCP Congestion Control Algorithms: The Multiplicative Decrease Parameter", in Proceedings of IEEE GLOBECOM, Miami, FL, December 2010

Related Links:

• The TCP Behavior Inference Tool (TBIT)
• Oshio et al., "Identification of Different TCP Versions Based on Cluster Analysis"
• Feyzabadi et al., "Identifying TCP Congestion Control Algorithms Using Active Probing"