Anirudh Sivaraman, Keith Winstein, Hari Balakrishnan
SIGCOMM, Hong Kong, , August 2013
When designing a distributed network protocol, typically it is in-
feasible to fully define the target network where the protocol is in-
tended to be used. It is therefore natural to ask: How faithfully
do protocol designers really need to understand the networks they
design for? What are the important signals that endpoints should
listen to? How can researchers gain confidence that systems that
work well on well-characterized test networks during development
will also perform adequately on real networks that are inevitably
more complex, or future networks yet to be developed? Is there a
tradeoff between the performance of a protocol and the breadth of
its intended operating range of networks? What is the cost of play-
ing fairly with cross-traffic that is governed by another protocol?
We examine these questions quantitatively in the context of con-
gestion control, by using an automated protocol-design tool to ap-
proximate the best possible congestion-control scheme given im-
perfect prior knowledge about the network. We found only weak
evidence of a tradeoff between operating range in link speeds and
performance, even when the operating range was extended to cover
a thousand-fold range of link speeds. We found that it may be ac-
ceptable to simplify some characteristics of the network—such as
its topology—when modeling for design purposes. Some other fea-
tures, such as the degree of multiplexing and the aggressiveness of
contending endpoints, are important to capture in a model.
[PDF (536KB)]
http://web.mit.edu/remy/learnability
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{sivaraman2013,
author = "Anirudh Sivaraman and Keith Winstein and Hari Balakrishnan",
title = "{ An Experimental Study of the Learnability of Congestion Control}",
booktitle = {SIGCOMM},
year = {2013},
month = {August},
address = {Hong Kong, }
}