Internet Congestion Control Benchmarking

Abstract

How do we assess a new Internet congestion control (CC) design? How do we compare it with other existing schemes? Under what scenarios and using what network parameters? These are just a handful of simple questions coming up every time a new CC design is going to be evaluated. Interestingly, the number of specific answers to these questions can be as large as the number of CC designers. In this work, we aim to highlight that the network congestion control, as a hot and active research topic, requires a crystal clear set(s) of \textit{CC Benchmarks} to form a common ground for quantitatively comparing and unambiguously assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a design with respect to the existing ones. As a first step toward that goal, we introduce general benchmarks that can capture the different performance of the existing Internet CC schemes. Using these benchmarks, we rank the Internet CC algorithms and illustrate that there is still lots of room for more innovations and improvements in this topic.