Effairness: Dealing with Time in Congestion Control Evaluation

Abstract

Congestion control algorithms are traditionally evaluated in contrast to ideal capacity allocations that specify instantaneous efficient fair rates for application sessions but ignore time. While the latter is tenable for local networks and networks where all application sessions last long, instantaneous ideal allocations are inadequate standards for congestion control evaluation in dynamic wide-area networks. In this paper, we propose an alternative ideal of an effair allocation that explicitly accounts for unavoidable propagation delay. We develop an algorithm for computing the effair allocation and present a metric of effairness that quantifies how close the actual network services are to the effair allocation on the receiver, session, and network levels.