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Why flow-completion time is the right metric for congestion control

Published: 10 January 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Users typically want their flows to complete as quickly as possible. This makes Flow Completion Time (FCT) an im portant - arguably the most important - performance metric for the user. Yet research on congestion control focuses almost entirely on maximizing link throughput, utilization and fairness, which matter more to the operator than the user. In this paper we show that with typical Internet flow sizes, existing (TCP Reno) and newly proposed (XCP) congestion control algorithms make flows last much longer than necessary - often by one or two orders of magnitude. In contrast, we show how a new and practical algorithm - RCP (Rate Control Protocol) - enables flows to complete close to the minimum possible

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N. Dukkipati, N. McKeow, "Why Flow-Completion Time is the Right metric for Congestion Control and why this means we need new algorithms," In http://yuba.stanford.edu/tr.html, Staford HPNG Technical Report TR05-HPNG-112102, November 2005.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 36, Issue 1
January 2006
90 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1111322
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 January 2006
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 36, Issue 1

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  • (2024)SUSS: Improving TCP Performance by Speeding Up Slow-StartProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672234(151-165)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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