One document matched: draft-sridharan-tcpm-ctcp-00.txt







Network Working Group                                      M. Sridharan 
Internet Draft                                                Microsoft 
Intended status: Experimental July 18, 2007                      K. Tan 
Expires: January 2008                                Microsoft Research 
                                                              D. Bansal 
                                                              D. Thaler 
                                                              Microsoft 
                                      
    Compound TCP: A New TCP Congestion Control for High-Speed and Long 
                             Distance Networks 


                       draft-sridharan-tcpm-ctcp-00.txt 


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   Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007). 
    
Abstract 


 
 
 
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   This document proposes Compound TCP (CTCP), a modification to TCP's 
   congestion control mechanism for use with TCP connections with large 
   congestion windows. The key idea behind CTCP is to add a scalable 
   delay-based component to the standard TCP's loss-based congestion 
   control. The sending rate of CTCP is controlled by both loss and 
   delay components. The delay-based component has a scalable window 
   increasing rule that not only efficiently uses the link capacity, 
   but on sensing queue build up, gracefully reduces the sending rate. 
   We have implemented CTCP on Microsoft's Windows and we have done 
   extensive testing on production links and in Windows Beta 
   deployments. We also engaged with Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 
   to evaluate the properties of CTCP. The results so far are very 
   encouraging. This document describes the Compound TCP algorithm in 
   detail, and solicits experimentation and feedback from the wider 
   community. In this document, we collectively refer to any TCP 
   congestion control algorithm that employs a linear increase function 
   for congestion control, including TCP Reno and all its variants as 
   Standard TCP. 





























 
 
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Table of Contents 

    
   1. Introduction.............................................. 3 
   2. Design Goals.............................................. 5 
   3. Compound TCP Control Law.................................. 5 
   4. Compound TCP Response Function............................ 8 
   5. Automatic Selection of Gamma.............................. 9 
   6. Implementation Issues ................................... 12 
   7. Deployment Issues........................................ 13 
   8. Security Considerations.................................. 13 
   9. IANA Considerations...................................... 13 
   10. Conclusions............................................. 14 
   11. Acknowledgments......................................... 14 
   12. References ............................................. 15 
       12.1. Normative References.............................. 15 
       12.2. Informative References ........................... 15 
   Author's Addresses.......................................... 16 
   Intellectual Property Statement ............................ 17 
   Disclaimer of Validity...................................... 17 
    
1. Introduction 
    
This document proposes Compound TCP, a modification to TCP's congestion 
control mechanism for fast, long-distance networks. The standard TCP 
congestion avoidance algorithm employs an additive increase and 
multiplicative decrease (AIMD) scheme, which employs a conservative 
linear growth function for increasing the congestion window and 
multiplicative decrease function on encountering a loss. For a high-
speed and long delay network, it will take standard TCP an unreasonably 
long time to recover the sending rate after a single loss event 
[RFC2581, RFC3649]. Moreover, it is well-known now that in a steady-
state environment, with a packet loss rate of p, the current standard 
TCP's average congestion window is inversely proportional to the square 
root of the packet loss rate [RFC2581,PADHYE]. Therefore, it requires 
an extremely small packet loss rate to sustain a large window. As an 
example, Floyd et al. [RFC3649], pointed out that under a 10Gbps link 
with 100ms delay, it will roughly take one hour for a standard TCP flow 
to fully utilize the link capacity, if no packet is lost or corrupted. 
This one hour error free transmission requires a packet loss rate 
around 10^-11 with 1500-byte size packets (one packet loss over 
2,600,000,000 packet transmission!), which is not practical in today's 
networks. 
 
 
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There are several proposals to address this fundamental limitation of 
TCP. One straightforward way to overcome this limitation is to modify 
TCP control's increase/decrease rule in its congestion avoidance stage. 
More specifically, in the absence of packet loss, the sender increases 
congestion window more quickly and decreases it more gently upon a 
packet loss. In a mixed network environment, the aggressive behavior of 
such approaches may severely degrade the performance of regular TCP 
flows whenever the network path is already highly utilized. When an 
aggressive high-speed variant flow traverses the bottleneck link with 
other standard TCP flows, it may increase its own share of bandwidth by 
reducing the throughput of other competing TCP flows. As a result the 
aggressive variants will cause much more self-induced packet losses on 
bottleneck links, and push back the throughput of the regular TCP 
flows. 
 
Then there is the class of high-speed protocols which use variances in 
RTT as a congestion indicator (e.g., [AFRICA,FAST]). The delay-based 
approaches are more-or-less derived from the seminal work of TCP-Vegas 
[VEGAS]. An increase in RTT is considered an early indicator of 
congestion, and the sending rate is cut in half to avoid buffer 
overflow. The problem in this approach comes when delay-based and loss-
based flows share the same bottleneck link. While the delay-based flows 
respond to increases in RTT by cutting its sending rate, the loss-based 
flows continue to increase their sending rate. As a result a delay-
based flow obtains far less bandwidth than its fair share. This 
weakness is hard to remedy for purely delay based approaches. 
 
The design of Compound TCP is to satisfy to efficiency requirement and 
TCP friendliness requirement simultaneously. The key idea is that if 
the link is under-utilized, the high-speed protocol should be 
aggressive and increase the sending rate quickly. However, once the 
link is fully utilized, being aggressive will not only adversely affect 
standard TCP flows but will also cause instability. As noted above, 
delay-based approaches already have a nice property of adjusting its 
aggressiveness based on the link utilization, which is observed by the 
end-systems as an increase in RTT. CTCP incorporates a scalable delay-
based component to the standard TCP's congestion avoidance algorithm. 
Using the delay component as an automatic tuning knob, CTCP is scalable 
yet TCP friendly. 
    
 
 
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2. Design Goals 
    
The design of CTCP is motivated by the following requirements: 
 
     o  Improve throughput by efficiently using the spare capacity in 
        the network 
     o  Good intra-protocol fairness when competing with flows that 
        have different RTTs 
     o  Should not impact the performance of standard TCP flows sharing 
        the same bottleneck 
     o  No additional feedback or support required from the network 
         
CTCP can efficiently use the network resource and achieve high link 
utilization. The aggressiveness can be controlled by adopting a rapid 
increase rule in the delay-based component. We choose CTCP to have 
similar aggressiveness as HighSpeed TCP [RFC3649]. Our design choice is 
motivated by the fact that HSTCP has been tested to be aggressive 
enough in real world networks and is now an experimental IETF RFC. We 
also wanted an upper bound on the amount of unfairness to standard TCP 
flows. However, as shown later, CTCP is able to maintain TCP 
friendliness under high statistical multiplexing and also while 
traversing poorly buffered links. CTCP has similar or in some cases, 
even improved RTT fairness compared to standard TCP. As we will 
demonstrate later this is due to the fact that the amount of backlogged 
packets for a connection is independent of the RTT of the connection. 
Even though CTCP does not require any feedback from the network, CTCP 
works well in ECN capable environments. There is also no expectation on 
the queuing algorithm deployed in the routers. 
 
As is the case with most high-speed variants today, CTCP does not 
modify slow-start. We agree to the belief that ramping-up faster than 
slow-start without additional information from the network can be 
harmful. Similar to HSTCP, to ensure TCP compatibility, CTCP's scalable 
component uses the same response function as Standard TCP when the 
current congestion window is at most Low_Window. CTCP sets Low_Window 
to 38 MSS-sized segments, corresponding to a packet drop rate of 10^-3 
for TCP. 
 
3. Compound TCP Control Law 
    
CTCP modifies Standard TCP's loss-based control law with a scalable 
delay-based component. To do so, a new state variable is introduced in 
current TCP Control Block (TCB), namely, dwnd (Delay Window), which 
controls the delay-based component in CTCP. The conventional congestion 
window, cwnd, remains untouched, which controls the loss-based 
component in CTCP. Thus, the CTCP sending window now is controlled by 
 
 
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both cwnd and dwnd. Specifically, the TCP sending window (wnd) is now 
calculated as follows: 
   
  wnd = min(cwnd + dwnd, awnd),             (1)                  
     
where awnd is the advertised window from the receiver.  
 
cwnd is updated in the same way as regular TCP in the congestion 
avoidance phase, i.e., cwnd is increased by 1 MSS every RTT and halved 
when a packet loss is encountered. The update to dwnd will be explained 
in detail later in the section. The combined window for CTCP from (1) 
above allows up to (cwnd + dwnd) packets in one RTT. Therefore, the 
increment of cwnd on the arrival of an ACK is modified accordingly: 
   
  cwnd = cwnd + 1/(cwnd+dwnd)               (2)  
   
As stated above, CTCP retains the same behavior during slow start. When 
a connection starts up dwnd is initialized to zero while the connection 
is in slow start phase. Thus the delay component is effective when the 
connection enters congestion avoidance. The delay-based algorithm has 
the following properties. It uses a scalable increase rule when it 
infers that the network is under-utilized. It also reduces the sending 
rate when it sense incipient congestion. By reducing its sending rate, 
the delay-based component yields to competing TCP flows and ensures TCP 
fairness. It reacts to packet losses by reducing its sending rate, 
which is necessary to avoid congestion collapse. Our control law for 
the delay-based component is derived from TCP Vegas. A state variable, 
called basertt tracks the minimum round trip delay seen by a packet 
over the network path. When a connection is started, basertt is updated 
to be the minimum RTT observed during the 3-way handshake. The CTCP 
sender also maintains a smoothed RTT srtt, updated as specified in 
[RFC2988]. Then, the number of backlogged packets of the connection can 
be estimated using, 
   
  expected (throughput) = wnd/basertt 
  actual (throughput) = wnd/srtt 
  diff = (expected - actual) * basertt 
   
The expected throughput gives the estimation of throughput CTCP gets if 
it does not overrun the network path. The actual throughput stands for 
the throughput CTCP really gets. Using this we can calculate the amount 
 
 
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of data backlogged in the bottleneck queue (diff). Congestion is 
detected by comparing diff to a threshold gamma. If diff < gamma, the 
network path is assumed to be under-utilized; otherwise the network 
path is assumed to be congested and CTCP should gracefully reduce its 
window. 
 
It is to be noted that a connection should have at least gamma packets 
backlogged in the bottleneck queue to be able to detect incipient 
congestion. This motivates the need for gamma to be small since the 
implication is that even when the bottleneck buffer size is small, CTCP 
will react early enough to ensure TCP fairness. On the other hand if 
gamma is too small compared to the queue size, CTCP will falsely detect 
congestion and will adversely affect the throughput. Choosing the 
appropriate value for gamma could be a problem because this parameter 
depends on both network configuration and the number of concurrent 
flows, which are generally unknown to the end-systems. We present an 
effective way to automatically estimate gamma later in later sections. 
 
The increase law of the delay-based component should make CTCP more 
scalable in high-speed and long delay pipes. We choose a binomial 
function to increase the delay window [BAINF01]. More specifically, 
when no congestion is detected, CTCP window increases using the 
following function 
   
  dwnd(t+1) = dwnd(t) + alpha*dwnd(t)^k    (3) 
   
When a packet loss occurs, the delay window is multiplicatively 
decreased, 
   
  dwnd(t+1) = dwnd(t)*(1-beta)             (4) 
   
where alpha, beta and k are tunable to obtain the desirable 
scalability, smoothness and responsiveness. We assume that a loss is 
detected by three duplicate ACKs. As explained in the next section we 
have modeled the response function for CTCP to have comparable 
scalability to HighSpeed TCP. Since there is already a loss-based 
component in CTCP, the delay-based component needs to be designed to 
only fill the gap, and the overall CTCP should follows the behavior 
defined in (3) and (4). We now summarize the control law for CTCP's 
delay component as follows; 
  

 
 
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 dwnd(t+1) =  
     dwnd(t) + alpha*dwnd(t)^k - 1,     if diff < gamma  (5) 
     dwnd(t) - eta*diff,                if diff >= gamma (6) 
     dwnd(t)(1-beta) - cwnd/2,          on packet loss   (7) 
 
where (5) shows that in the increase phase, dwnd only needs to increase 
by (alpha*dwnd(t)^k - 1) packets, since the loss-based component cwnd 
will also increase by 1 packet. When a packet loss occurs, dwnd is set 
to the difference between the desired reduced window size and that can 
be provided by cwnd. The rule in equation (6) is very important to 
preserve good RTT and TCP fairness. Eta defines how rapidly the delay 
component should reduce its window when congestion is detected. Note 
that dwnd is never negative, so the CTCP window is lower bounded by its 
loss based component, which is same as Standard TCP.  
  
If a retransmission timeout occurs, dwnd should be reset to zero and 
the delay-based component is disabled. It is because that after a 
timeout, the TCP sender enters slow-start phase. After the CTCP sender 
exits the slow-start recovery state and enters congestion avoidance, 
dwnd control kicks in again.  
 

4. Compound TCP Response Function 
    
The TCP response function provides a relationship between TCP's average 
congestion window w in MSS-sized segments as a function of the steady-
state packet drop rate p. To specify a modified response function for 
CTCP, we use the analytical model in [CTCPI06] to derive a relationship 
between w and p. Based on this model, the response function for CTCP 
provides the following relationship between w and p, 
 
   w ~.1/(p^(1/2-k))       (8) 
    
As explained earlier we modeled the response function for CTCP to have 
comparable scalability to HighSpeed TCP. The response function for 
HighSpeed TCP is 
 
   w ~.1/p^0.835           (9) 
    
Comparing (8) and (9) we get k to be around 0.8. Since it's difficult 
to implement an arbitrary power we choose k = 0.75 which can be 
implemented using a fast integer algorithm for square root. Based on 
extensive experimentation, we choose alpha = 1/8 and beta = 1/2. 
Substituting the above values for alpha, beta and k in (8) we get the 
 
 
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following response function for CTCP, 
 
   w = 0.255/p^0.8        (10) 
    
The response function for CTCP is compared with HSTCP and is 
illustrated in Table 1 below.  

                                    CTCP                 HSTCP 

     Packet Drop Rate P   Congestion Window W    Congestion Window W 
     ------------------   -------------------    ------------------- 
            10^-3                     64                     38 
            10^-4                    404                    263 
            10^-5                   2552                   1795 
            10^-6                  16107                  12279 
            10^-7                 101630                  83981 
            10^-8                 641245                 574356 
            10^-9                4045987                3928088 
            10^-10              25528453               26864653 
 
   Table 1: TCP Response function for CTCP & HSTCP 
    
The values in Table 1 illustrate that our choice of parameters makes 
CTCP slightly more aggressive than HSTCP in moderate and low packet 
loss rates but approaches HSTCP for larger windows. The reason we 
choose to do this is because unlike HighSpeed TCP, CTCP's delay control 
is capable of scaling back on detecting incipient congestion. As a 
result we expect CTCP to be more TCP friendly than HighSpeed TCP. We 
show that this is in fact the case even under low buffering conditions 
in the presence of high statistical multiplexing. The fairness 
considerations and choice of gamma are detailed in later sections. 
 
5. Automatic Selection of Gamma 
    
To effectively detect early congestions, CTCP requires estimating the 
backlogged packets at bottleneck queue and compares this estimate to a 
pre-defined threshold gamma. However, setting this threshold gamma is 
particular difficult for CTCP (and to many other similar delay-based 
approaches), because gamma largely depends on the network configuration 
and the number of concurrent flows that compete for the same bottleneck 
link, which are, unfortunately, unknown to end-systems. Based on 
experimentation over varying conditions we selected gamma to be 30 
packets. This value provided a pretty good tradeoff between TCP 
fairness and throughput. However a fixed gamma can still result in poor 
TCP friendliness over under-buffered network links. One naive solution 
 
 
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is to choose a very small value for gamma, however this can falsely 
detect congestion and adversely affect throughput. To address this 
problem we use a method called tuning-by-emulation to dynamically 
adjust gamma. The basic idea of our proposal is to estimate the 
backlogged packets of a Standard TCP flow along the same path by 
emulating the behavior of a Standard TCP flow in runtime. Based on 
this, gamma is set so as to ensure good TCP-friendliness. CTCP can then 
automatically adapt to different network configurations (i.e., buffer 
provisioning) and also concurrent competing flows.  
 
Our analytical model on CTCP shows that gamma should at least be less 
than B/m+l to ensure the effectiveness of incipient congestion 
detection, where m and l present the flow number of concurrent Standard 
TCP flows and CTCP flows that are competing for the same bottleneck 
link [CTCPI06,CTCPP06,CTCPT]. Generally, both B and (m+l) are unknown 
to end-systems. It is very difficult to estimate these values from end-
systems in real-time, especially the number of flows, which can vary 
significantly over time. Fortunately there is a way to directly 
estimate the ratio B/m+l, even though the individual variables B or 
(m+l) are hard to estimate. Let's first assume there are (m+l) regular 
TCP flows in the network. These (m+l) flows should be able to fairly 
share the bottleneck capacity in steady state. Therefore, they should 
also get roughly equal share of the buffers at the bottleneck, which 
should equal to B/m+l. For such a Standard TCP flow, although it does 
not know either B or (m+l), it can still infer B/m+l easily by 
estimating its backlogged packets, which is a rather mature technique 
widely used in many delay-based protocols.  This brings us to the core 
idea of CTCP's algorithm; CTCP lets the sender emulate the congestion 
window of a Standard TCP flow. Using this emulated window, we can 
estimate the buffer occupancy (Q) for a Standard TCP flow. Q can be 
regarded as a conservative estimate of B/m+l assuming that the high 
speed flow is more aggressive than Standard TCP. By choosing gamma <= 
Q, we can ensure TCP fairness.  
 
The implementation is actually trivial. This is because CTCP already 
emulates Standard TCP as the loss-based component. We can simply 
estimate the buffer occupancy of a competing Standard TCP flow from 
state which CTCP already maintains. We choose an initial gamma = 30 and 
Q is calculated as follows, 
 
 expected_reno (throughput) = cwnd/basertt 
 actual_reno (throughput) = cwnd/srtt 
 diff_reno = (expected - actual) * basertt 
 


 
 
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The difference between diff_reno and diff is simply that diff_reno is 
computed only using the loss based component cwnd. Since Standard TCP 
reaches its maximum buffer occupancy just before a loss, CTCP uses the 
diff_reno value computed in the earlier round to calculate the gamma 
for the next round. Whenever a loss happens, gamma is chosen to be less 
than diff_reno and the sample values of gamma are updated using a 
standard exponentially weighted moving average. The pseudocode to 
calculate gamma is shown below. Here a round tracks every window worth 
of data. We will provide more details on how to maintain a round in 
Section 7.  
 
  Initialization:  
    diff_reno = invalid;  
     Gamma = 30;  
   
  End-of-Round:  
   
     expected_reno = cwnd / baseRTT;  
     actual_reno = cwnd / RTT;  
     diff_reno = (Expected_reno-Actual_reno)*baseRTT;  
   
  On-Packet-Loss:  
   
  If diff_reno is valid then  
     g_sample = 3/4*Diff_reno;  
     gamma = gamma*(1-lamda)+ lamda*g_sample;  
     if (gamma < gamma_low)  
       gamma=gamma_low;  
     else if (gamma > gamma_high)  
       gamma=gamma_high;  
     fi  
     diff_reno = invalid;  
  fi  
    

The recommended values for gamma_low and gamma_high are 5 and 30 
respectively. diff_reno is set to invalid to prevent using stale 
diff_reno data when there are consecutive losses between which no 
samples were taken.  
    




 
 
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6. Implementation Issues 
    
The first challenge is to design a mechanism that can precisely track 
the changes in round trip time with minimal overhead, and can scale 
well to support many concurrent TCP connections. Naively taking RTT 
sample for every packet will obviously be an over-kill for both CPU and 
system memory, especially for high-speed and long distance networks 
where the congestion window can be very large. Therefore, CTCP needs to 
limit the number of samples taken, but without compromising on 
accuracy. In our implementation, we only take up to M sample per window 
of data. M is chosen to scale with the round trip delay and window 
size.  
  
In order to further improve the efficiency in memory usage, we have 
developed a memory allocation mechanism to dynamically allocate sample 
buffers from a kernel fixed-size per-processor pool. The size should be 
chosen as a function of the available system memory. As the window size 
increases, M can be updated so that the samples are uniformly 
distributed over the window. As M gets updated more memory blocks are 
allocated and linked to the existing sample buffers. If the sending 
rate changes either due to network conditions or due to application 
behavior, the sample blocks are reclaimed to the global memory pool. 
This dynamic buffer management ensures the scalability of our 
implementation, so that it can work well even in a busy server which 
could host tens of thousands of TCP connections simultaneously. Note 
that it may also require high-resolution timer to time RTT samples.  
  
The rest of the implementation is rather straightforward. We add two 
new state variables into the standard TCP Control Block, namely dwnd 
and basertt. The basertt is a value that tracks the minimum RTT sample 
measured seen so far and it is used as an estimation of the 
transmission delay of a single packet. Basertt is usually cleared if a 
retransmission timeout is hit. It is a good idea to re-measure the 
basertt incase the network conditions have changed. Following the 
common practice of high-speed protocols, CTCP reverts to standard TCP 
behavior when the window is small. Delay-based component only kicks in 
when cwnd is larger than some threshold, currently set to 38 packets 
assuming 1500 byte MTU. dwnd is updated at the end of each round. Note 
that no RTT sampling and dwnd update happens during the loss recovery 
phase. It is because the retransmission during the loss recovery phase 
may result in inaccurate RTT samples and can adversely affect the 

 
 
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delay-based control. 
 
7. Deployment Issues 
    
There are several variations of TCP proposed for high speed and long 
delay networks. We do not claim Compound TCP to be the best nor the 
most optimal algorithm. However, based on our extensive testing via 
simulations, experimentation including those on production links as 
well as beta deployments of a reasonable scale, we believe that 
Compound TCP satisfies the design considerations outlined before in 
this document. It effectively uses spare bandwidth in high speed 
networks, achieves good intra-protocol fairness even in the presence of 
differing RTTs and does not adversely impact standard TCP. Further, 
Compound TCP does not require any changes or any new feedback from the 
network and is deployable over the current Internet in an incremental 
fashion. It inter-operates with Standard TCP and requires support only 
one the send side of a TCP connection for it to be used. 
We also note that similar to High Speed TCP, in environments typical of 
much of the current Internet, Compound TCP behaves exactly like 
Standard TCP. This it does by ensuring that is follows standard TCP 
algorithm without any modification any time congestion window is less 
than 38 packets. Only when congestion window is greater than 38 
packets, does the delay based component of Compound TCP gets invoked. 
Thus, for example for a connection with RTT of 100ms, end to end 
bandwidth must be greater than 4.8Mbps for CTCP algorithm to have any 
difference in its response to network conditions than a standard TCP.  

Further, we do not believe that the deployment of Compound TCP would 
block the possible deployment of alternate experimental congestion 
control algorithms such as Fast TCP [FAST] or CUBIC [CUBIC]. In 
particular, Compound TCP’s response has a fallback to loss based 
function that has characteristics very similar to HS-TCP or N parallel 
TCP connections. 
 
8.    Security Considerations 
 
This proposal makes no changes to the underlying security of the TCP 
protocol. 
 
9.    IANA Considerations 
 
There are no IANA considerations regarding this proposal. 
 




 
 
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10.   Conclusions 
 
This document proposes a novel congestion control algorithm for TCP for 
high speed and long delay networks. By introducing a delay based 
component in addition to a standard TCP based loss component, Compound 
TCP is able to detect and effectively use spare bandwidth that may be 
available on a high speed and long delay network. Further, delay based 
component detects onset of congestion early and gracefully reduces 
sending rate. The loss based component, on the other hand, ensures 
there is effective response to losses in network while in the absence 
of losses, keeps the throughput of CTCP lower bounded by TCP Reno. 
Thus, CTCP is not timid, nor induces more self induced packet loss than 
a single standard TCP flow. Thus Compound TCP is efficient in consuming 
available bandwidth while being friendly to standard TCP. Further, the 
delay component does not have any RTT bias thereby reducing the RTT 
bias of the Compound TCP vis-a-vis standard TCP. 
 
Compound TCP has been implemented as an optional component in Microsoft 
Windows Vista Operating System. It has been tested and experimented 
through broad Windows Vista beta deployments where it has been verified 
to meet its objectives without causing any adverse impact. SLAC has 
also evaluated Compound TCP on production links. Based on testing and 
evaluation done so far, we believe Compound TCP is safe to deploy on 
the current Internet. We welcome additional analysis, testing and 
evaluation of Compound TCP by Internet community at large and continue 
to do additional testing ourselves. 
 
11.   Acknowledgments 
    
The authors would like to thank Jingmin Song for all his efforts in 
evaluating the algorithm on the test beds. We are thankful to Yee-ting 
Lee and Les Cottrell for testing and evaluation of Compound TCP on 
Internet2 links [SLAC]. We would like to thank Sanjay Kaniyar for his 
insightful comments and for driving this project in Microsoft. We are 
also thankful to the Microsft.com data center staff who helped us 
evaluate Compound TCP on their production links. In addition, several 
folks from the Internet research community who attended the High-Speed 
TCP Summit at Microsoft [MSWRK] have provided valuable feedback on 
Compound TCP. Finally, we are thankful to the Windows Vista program 
beta participants who helped us test and evaluate CTCP.  







 
 
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12.   References 
    
12.1. Normative References 
    
   [RFC2581] Allman, M., Paxson, V. and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion 
             Control", RFC 2581, April 1999. 
                 
12.2. Informative References 
    
   [AFRICA]  R. King, R. Baraniuk and R. riedi, "TCP-Africa: An 
             Adaptive and Fair Rapid Increase Rule for Scalable 
             TCP", In Proc. INFOCOM 2005. 
                 
   [BAINF01] D. Bansal and H. Balakrishnan, "Binomial Congestion 
             Control Algorithms", Proc INFOCOM 2001. 
                 
   [CTCPI06] K. Tan, Jingmin Song, Qian Zhang, Murari Sridharan, "A 
             Compound TCP Approach for High-speed and Long Distance 
             Networks", in IEEE Infocom, April 2006, Barcelona, 
             Spain. 
                 
   [CTCPP06] K. Tan, J. Song, Q. Zhang, and M. Sridharan, "Compound   
             TCP: A Scalable and TCP-friendly Congestion Control for 
             High-speed Networks", in 4th International workshop on 
             Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks (PFLDNet), 
             2006, Nara, Japan. 
                 
   [CTCPT]   K. Tan, J. Song, M. Sridharan, and C.Y. Ho, "CTCP: 
             Improving TCP-Friendliness Over Low-Buffered Network   
             Links", Microsoft Technical Report. 
                 
   [CUBIC]   I. Rhee, L. Xu and S. Ha, "CUBIC for fast long distance 
             networks", Internet Draft, Expires Aug 31, 2007, draft-
             rhee-tcp-cubic-00.txt 
                 
   [FAST]    C. Jin, D. Wei, S. Low, "FAST TCP: Motivation, 
             Architecture, Algorithms, Performance", in IEEE Infocom 
             2004. 
    
   [MSWRK]   Microsoft High-Speed TCP Summit, 
             http://research.microsoft.com/events/TCPSummit/ 
                 
   [PADHYE]  J. Padhya, V. Firoiu, D. Towsley and J. Kurose, "Modeling 
             TCP Throughput: A Simple Model and its Empirical 
             Validation", in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 1998. 
                 

 
 
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Internet-Draft               Compound TCP                     July 2007 
    

   [RFC2988] V. Paxson and M. Allman, "Computing TCP's Retransmission 
             Timer", RFC 2988, November 2000. 
                 
   [RFC3649] S. Floyd, "HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows", 
             RFC 3649, Dec 2003. 
                 
   [SLAC]    Yee-Ting Li, "Evaluation of TCP Congestion Control 
             Algorithms on the Windows Vista Platform", SLAC-TN-06-
             005, 
             http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slactns/tn04/slac-tn-
             06-005.pdf 
                 
   [VEGAS]   L. Brakmo, S. O'Malley, and L. Peterson, "TCP Vegas: New 
             techniques for congestion detection and avoidance", in 
             Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, 1994. 
                 
Authors' Addresses 

   Murari Sridharan 
   Microsoft Corporation 
   1 Microsoft Way, Redmond 98052 
    
   Email: muraris@microsoft.com 
    

   Kun Tan 
   Microsoft Research 
   5/F, Beijing Sigma Center 
   No.49, Zhichun Road, Hai Dian District 
   Beijing China 100080 
    
   Email: kuntan@microsoft.com 
    

   Deepak Bansal 
   Microsoft Corporation 
   1 Microsoft Way, Redmond 98052 
    
   Email: dbansal@microsoft.com 
    

   Dave Thaler 
   Microsoft Corporation 
   1 Microsoft Way, Redmond 98052 
    
   Email: dthaler@microsoft.com 
    
 
 
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