[e2e] Persistent congestion with few TCP-compatible sources?

Reiner Ludwig Reiner.Ludwig at ericsson.com
Mon May 1 20:45:28 PDT 2006


Hi,

in a contribution that I'm writting for 3GPP, I would like to make the 
following statement:

"It is well-known that persistent congestion (large average queue sizes 
and high packet drop rates) – which is an essential precondition for the 
occurrence of a series of congestion-related back-to-back losses of [IP 
packets] – will not occur as long as only a few (e.g., less than 100) 
traffic sources share the same queue at the bottleneck link of an 
end-to-end path, and as long as those traffic sources have implemented a 
TCP-compatible congestion control scheme."

[The full paragraph is copied below]

Can anyone, please, point me to some established papers that would 
backup that statement?

///Reiner

--------------

"It is well-known that persistent congestion (large average queue sizes 
and high packet drop rates) – which is an essential precondition for the 
occurrence of a series of congestion-related back-to-back losses of PDCP 
PDUs – will not occur as long as only a few (e.g., less than 100) 
traffic sources share the same queue at the bottleneck link of an 
end-to-end path, and as long as those traffic sources have implemented a 
TCP-compatible congestion control scheme. Note that in response to a 
packet loss TCP halves its send rate. In fact, this rate halving 
behaviour of TCP is widely acknowledged as the basis for the stability 
of the Internet. Note also that this discussion is in principle 
independent of the queue management scheme implemented at the bottleneck 
link, e.g., whether it is a passive drop-tail queue management scheme, 
or an active queue management scheme which is tailored to maintaining 
free buffer space for the purpose of absorbing burst arrivals of 
packets. It should be noted, however, that active queue management 
schemes are known to reduce packet drop rates [RFC 2309], and are widely 
deployed in state-of-the-art IP routers."



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