Asymptotically optimal design of congestion control for high speed data networks

Abstract

The basic mechanism of sliding windows for the congestion control of virtual circuits is examined. A problem concerning the optimal design of windows is formulated and formulas for basic quantities of interest, such as throughput, delay and moments of packet queues, in the optimal operating regime as well as in other regimes, are obtained. All results are asymptotic, in which the main parameter is lambda , the delay-bandwidth product. It is shown that K* approximately lambda +O( square root lambda ), where K* is the optimum window size. Also, in the optimal operating regime, the steady-state mean and standard deviation of the queued packets at individual nodes O( square root / lambda ). The design consequences are examined in the contexts of adaptive dynamic windowing, buffer sizing, and shared versus separate buffers in the case of multiple virtual circuits.<>