[iccrg] Musings on the future of Internet Congestion Control

[Michael Welzl <[e-mail]>]

Dear ICCRGers,

We just got a paper accepted that I wanted to share:
Michael Welzl, Peyman Teymoori, Safiqul Islam, David Hutchison, Stein Gjessing: "Future Internet Congestion Control: The Diminishing Feedback Problem", accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Magazine, 2022.

The preprint is available at:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642>
I thought that it could provoke an interesting discussion in this group.

Figures 4 and 5 in this paper show that, across the world, network links do not just become "faster”: the range between the low end and the high end grows too.
This, I think, is problematic for a global end-to-end standard - e.g., it means that we cannot simply keep scaling IW along forever (or, if we do, utilization will decline more and more).

So, we ask: what is the way ahead?  Should congestion control really stay end-to-end?

Cheers,
Michael