Network Traffic and Congestion Control

When more data flows through a network than its links can carry, packets queue up, delay spikes, and connections slow to a crawl — a phenomenon called congestion that researchers have worked to understand and tame since the early days of the internet. Congestion control spans everything from the algorithms built into TCP that govern how fast a sender transmits, to active queue management schemes that let routers signal trouble before buffers overflow, to methods for estimating available bandwidth across paths whose topology and traffic are constantly shifting. As networks grow more heterogeneous — mixing wired backbones, wireless links, satellite hops, and high-speed data centers — techniques calibrated for one environment often perform poorly in another, making cross-layer adaptation an active area of study. Open questions center on how to achieve fairness and low latency simultaneously at very high speeds, how to coordinate congestion signals across multicast trees where a single stream reaches many receivers, and how to design protocols that remain stable as internet traffic patterns continue to evolve.

Works

77,008

Total citations

871,174

Keywords

Congestion ControlTCPActive Queue ManagementNetwork PerformanceBandwidth EstimationInternet Topology