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Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) D. Papadimitriou, Ed. Request for Comments: 6077 Alcatel-Lucent Category: Informational M. Welzl ISSN: 2070-1721 University of Oslo

                                                             M. Scharf
                                               University of Stuttgart
                                                            B. Briscoe
                                                              BT & UCL
                                                         February 2011
        Open Research Issues in Internet Congestion Control

Abstract

 This document describes some of the open problems in Internet
 congestion control that are known today.  This includes several new
 challenges that are becoming important as the network grows, as well
 as some issues that have been known for many years.  These challenges
 are generally considered to be open research topics that may require
 more study or application of innovative techniques before Internet-
 scale solutions can be confidently engineered and deployed.

Status of This Memo

 This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
 published for informational purposes.
 This document is a product of the Internet Research Task Force
 (IRTF).  The IRTF publishes the results of Internet-related research
 and development activities.  These results might not be suitable for
 deployment.  This RFC represents the consensus of the Internet
 Congestion Control Research Group (ICCRG) of the Internet Research
 Task Force (IRTF).  Documents approved for publication by the IRSG
 are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2
 of RFC 5741.
 Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
 and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
 http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6077.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 1] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
 document authors.  All rights reserved.
 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
 (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
 publication of this document.  Please review these documents
 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
 to this document.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 2] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

Table of Contents

 1. Introduction ....................................................3
 2. Global Challenges ...............................................5
    2.1. Heterogeneity ..............................................5
    2.2. Stability ..................................................7
    2.3. Fairness ...................................................8
 3. Detailed Challenges ............................................10
    3.1. Challenge 1: Network Support ..............................10
         3.1.1. Performance and Robustness .........................14
         3.1.2. Granularity of Network Component Functions .........15
         3.1.3. Information Acquisition ............................16
         3.1.4. Feedback Signaling .................................17
    3.2. Challenge 2: Corruption Loss ..............................17
    3.3. Challenge 3: Packet Size ..................................19
    3.4. Challenge 4: Flow Startup .................................24
    3.5. Challenge 5: Multi-Domain Congestion Control ..............26
         3.5.1. Multi-Domain Transport of Explicit
                Congestion Notification ............................26
         3.5.2. Multi-Domain Exchange of Topology or
                Explicit Rate Information ..........................27
         3.5.3. Multi-Domain Pseudowires ...........................28
    3.6. Challenge 6: Precedence for Elastic Traffic ...............30
    3.7. Challenge 7: Misbehaving Senders and Receivers ............31
    3.8. Other Challenges ..........................................33
         3.8.1. RTT Estimation .....................................33
         3.8.2. Malfunctioning Devices .............................35
         3.8.3. Dependence on RTT ..................................36
         3.8.4. Congestion Control in Multi-Layered Networks .......36
         3.8.5. Multipath End-to-End Congestion Control and
                Traffic Engineering ................................37
         3.8.6. ALGs and Middleboxes ...............................37
 4. Security Considerations ........................................38
 5. References .....................................................39
    5.1. Informative References ....................................39
 6. Acknowledgments ................................................50
 7. Contributors ...................................................50

1. Introduction

 This document, the result of the Internet Congestion Control Research
 Group (ICCRG), describes some of the open research topics in the
 domain of Internet congestion control that are known today.  We begin
 by reviewing some proposed definitions of congestion and congestion
 control based on current understandings.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 3] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 Congestion can be defined as a state or condition that occurs when
 network resources are overloaded, resulting in impairments for
 network users as objectively measured by the probability of loss
 and/or delay.  The overload results in the reduction of utility in
 networks that support both spatial and temporal multiplexing, but no
 reservation [Keshav07].  Congestion control is a (typically
 distributed) algorithm to share network resources among competing
 traffic sources.
 Two components of distributed congestion control have been defined in
 the context of primal-dual modeling [Kelly98].  Primal congestion
 control refers to the algorithm executed by the traffic sources for
 controlling their sending rates or window sizes.  This is normally a
 closed-loop control, where this operation depends on feedback.  TCP
 algorithms fall in this category.  Dual congestion control is
 implemented by the routers through gathering information about the
 traffic traversing them.  A dual congestion control algorithm
 updates, implicitly or explicitly, a congestion measure or congestion
 rate and sends it back, implicitly or explicitly, to the traffic
 sources that use that link.  Queue management algorithms such as
 Random Early Detection (RED) [Floyd93] or Random Exponential Marking
 (REM) [Ath01] fall into the "dual" category.
 Congestion control provides for a fundamental set of mechanisms for
 maintaining the stability and efficiency of the Internet.  Congestion
 control has been associated with TCP since Van Jacobson's work in
 1988, but there is also congestion control outside of TCP (e.g., for
 real-time multimedia applications, multicast, and router-based
 mechanisms) [RFC5783].  The Van Jacobson end-to-end congestion
 control algorithms [Jacobson88] [RFC2581] [RFC5681] are used by the
 Internet transport protocol TCP [RFC4614].  They have been proven to
 be highly successful over many years but have begun to reach their
 limits, as the heterogeneity of the data link and physical layer on
 the one hand, and of applications on the other, are pulling TCP
 congestion control beyond its natural operating regime.  This is
 because it performs poorly as the bandwidth or delay increases.  A
 side effect of these deficiencies is that an increasing share of
 hosts use non-standardized congestion control enhancements (for
 instance, many Linux distributions have been shipped with "CUBIC"
 [Ha08] as the default TCP congestion control mechanism).
 While the original Van Jacobson algorithm requires no congestion-
 related state in routers, more recent modifications have departed
 from the strict application of the end-to-end principle [Saltzer84]
 in order to avoid congestion collapse.  Active Queue Management (AQM)
 in routers, e.g., RED and some of its variants such as Adaptive RED
 (ARED), improves performance by keeping queues small (implicit
 feedback via dropped packets), while Explicit Congestion Notification

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 4] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 (ECN) [Floyd94] [RFC3168] passes one bit of congestion information
 back to senders when an AQM would normally drop a packet.  It is to
 be noted that other variants of RED built on AQM, such as Weighted
 RED (WRED) and RED with In/Out (RIO) [Clark98] are for quality
 enforcement, whereas Stabilized RED (SRED), and CHOKe [Pan00] and its
 extensions such as XCHOKe [Chhabra02], are flow policers.  In
 [Bonald00], authors analytically evaluated RED performance.
 These measures do improve performance, but there is a limit to how
 much can be accomplished without more information from routers.  The
 requirement of extreme scalability together with robustness has been
 a difficult hurdle for acceleration of this information flow.
 Primal-dual TCP/AQM distributed algorithm stability and equilibrium
 properties have been extensively studied (cf. [Low02], [Low03.1],
 [Low03.2], [Kelly98], and [Kelly05]).
 Congestion control includes many new challenges that are becoming
 important as the network grows, in addition to the issues that have
 been known for many years.  These are generally considered to be open
 research topics that may require more study or application of
 innovative techniques before Internet-scale solutions can be
 confidently engineered and deployed.  In what follows, an overview of
 some of these challenges is given.

2. Global Challenges

 This section describes the global challenges to be addressed in the
 domain of Internet congestion control.

2.1. Heterogeneity

 The Internet encompasses a large variety of heterogeneous IP networks
 that are realized by a multitude of technologies, which result in a
 tremendous variety of link and path characteristics: capacity can be
 either scarce in very-slow-speed radio links (several kbps), or there
 may be an abundant supply in high-speed optical links (several
 gigabit per second).  Concerning latency, scenarios range from local
 interconnects (much less than a millisecond) to certain wireless and
 satellite links with very large latencies up to or over a second).
 Even higher latencies can occur in space communication.  As a
 consequence, both the available bandwidth and the end-to-end delay in
 the Internet may vary over many orders of magnitude, and it is likely
 that the range of parameters will further increase in the future.
 Additionally, neither the available bandwidth nor the end-to-end
 delay is constant.  At the IP layer, competing cross-traffic, traffic
 management in routers, and dynamic routing can result in sudden
 changes in the characteristics of an end-to-end path.  Additional

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 5] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 dynamics can be caused by link layer mechanisms, such as shared-media
 access (e.g., in wireless networks), changes to new links due to
 mobility (horizontal/vertical handovers), topology modifications
 (e.g., in ad hoc or meshed networks), link layer error correction,
 and dynamic bandwidth provisioning schemes.  From this, it follows
 that path characteristics can be subject to substantial changes
 within short time frames.
 Congestion control algorithms have to deal with this variety in an
 efficient and stable way.  The congestion control principles
 introduced by Van Jacobson assume a rather static scenario and
 implicitly target configurations where the bandwidth-delay product is
 of the order of some dozens of packets at most.  While these
 principles have proved to work in the Internet for almost two
 decades, much larger bandwidth-delay products and increased dynamics
 challenge them more and more.  There are many situations where
 today's congestion control algorithms react in a suboptimal way,
 resulting, among other things, in low resource utilization.
 This has resulted in a multitude of new proposals for congestion
 control algorithms.  For instance, since the Additive Increase
 Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) behavior of TCP is too conservative in
 practical environments when the congestion window is large, several
 high-speed congestion control extensions have been developed.
 However, these new algorithms may be less robust or starve legacy
 flows in certain situations for which they have not been designed.
 At the time of writing, there is no common agreement in the IETF on
 which algorithm(s) and protocol(s) to choose.
 It is always possible to tune congestion control parameters based on
 some knowledge of the environment and the application scenario.
 However, the interaction between multiple congestion control
 techniques is not yet well understood.  The fundamental challenge is
 whether it is possible to define one congestion control mechanism
 that operates reasonably well in a whole range of scenarios that
 exist in the Internet.  Hence, important research questions are how
 new Internet congestion control mechanisms would have to be designed,
 which maximum degree of dynamics they can efficiently handle, and
 whether they can keep the generality of the existing end-to-end
 solutions.
 Some improvements to congestion control could be realized by simple
 changes to single functions in end-systems or optimizations of
 network components.  However, new mechanism(s) might also require a
 fundamental redesign of the overall network architecture, and they
 may even affect the design of Internet applications.  This can imply
 significant interoperability and backward compatibility challenges
 and/or create network accessibility obstacles.  In particular,

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 6] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 networks and/or applications that do not use or support a new
 congestion control mechanism could be penalized by a significantly
 worse performance compared to what they would get if everybody used
 the existing mechanisms (cf. the discussion on fairness in
 Section 2.3).  [RFC5033] defines several criteria to evaluate the
 appropriateness of a new congestion control mechanism.  However, a
 key issue is how much performance deterioration is acceptable for
 "legacy" applications.  This tradeoff between performance and cost
 has to be very carefully examined for all new congestion control
 schemes.

2.2. Stability

 Control theory is a mathematical tool for describing dynamic systems.
 It lends itself to modeling congestion control -- TCP is a perfect
 example of a typical "closed loop" system that can be described in
 control theoretic terms.  However, control theory has had to be
 extended to model the interactions between multiple control loops in
 a network [Vinnic02].  In control theory, there is a mathematically
 defined notion of system stability.  In a stable system, for any
 bounded input over any amount of time, the output will also be
 bounded.  For congestion control, what is actually meant by global
 stability is typically asymptotic stability: a mechanism should
 converge to a certain state irrespective of the initial state of the
 network.  Local stability means that if the system is perturbed from
 its stable state it will quickly return toward the locally stable
 state.
 Some fundamental facts known from control theory are useful as
 guidelines when designing a congestion control mechanism.  For
 instance, a controller should only be fed a system state that
 reflects its output.  A (low-pass) filter function should be used in
 order to pass to the controller only states that are expected to last
 long enough for its action to be meaningful [Jain88].  Action should
 be carried out whenever such feedback arrives, as it is a fundamental
 principle of control that the control frequency should ideally be
 equal to the feedback frequency.  Reacting faster leads to
 oscillations and instability, while reacting more slowly makes the
 system tardy [Jain90].
 Control theoretic modeling of a realistic network can be quite
 difficult, especially when taking distinct packet sizes and
 heterogeneous round-trip times (RTTs) into account.  It has therefore
 become common practice to model simpler cases and to leave the more
 complicated (realistic) situations for simulations.  Clearly, if a
 mechanism is not stable in a simple scenario, it is generally
 useless; this method therefore helps to eliminate faulty congestion
 control candidates at an early stage.  However, a mechanism that is

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 7] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 found to be stable in simulations can still not be safely deployed in
 real networks, since simulation scenarios make simplifying
 assumptions.
 TCP stability can be attributed to two key aspects that were
 introduced in [Jacobson88]: the AIMD control law during congestion
 avoidance, which is based on a simple, vector-based analysis of two
 controllers sharing one resource with synchronous RTTs [Chiu89]; and
 the "conservation of packets principle", which, once the control has
 reached "steady state", tries to maintain an equal amount of packets
 in flight at any time by only sending a packet into the network when
 a packet has left the network (as indicated by an ACK arriving at the
 sender).  The latter aspect has guided many decisions regarding
 changes that were made to TCP over the years.
 The reasoning in [Jacobson88] assumes all senders to be acting at the
 same time.  The stability of TCP under more realistic network
 conditions has been investigated in a large number of ensuing works,
 leading to no clear conclusion that TCP would also be asymptotically
 stable under arbitrary network conditions.  On the other hand,
 research has concluded that stability can be assured with constraints
 on dynamics that are less stringent than the "conservation of packets
 principle".  From control theory, only rate increase (not the target
 rate) needs to be inversely proportional to RTT (whereas window-based
 control converges on a target rate inversely proportional to RTT).  A
 congestion control mechanism can therefore converge on a rate that is
 independent of RTT as long as its dynamics depend on RTT (e.g., FAST
 TCP [Jin04]).
 In the stability analysis of TCP and of these more modern controls,
 the impact of slow-start on stability (which can be significant as
 short-lived HTTP flows often never leave this phase) is not entirely
 clear.

2.3. Fairness

 Recently, the way the Internet community reasons about fairness has
 been called deeply into question [Bri07].  Much of the community has
 taken fairness to mean approximate equality between the rates of
 flows (flow rate fairness) that experience equivalent path congestion
 as with TCP [RFC2581] [RFC5681] and TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC)
 [RFC5348].  [RFC3714] depicts the resulting situation as "The
 Amorphous Problem of Fairness".

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 8] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 A parallel tradition has been built on [Kelly98] where, as long as
 each user is accountable for the cost their rate causes to others
 [MacK95], the set of rates that everyone chooses is deemed fair (cost
 fairness) -- because with any other set of choices people would lose
 more value than they gained overall.
 In comparison, the debate between max-min, proportional, and TCP
 fairness is about mere details.  These three all share the assumption
 that equal flow rates are desirable; they merely differ in the
 second-order issue of how to share out excess capacity in a network
 of many bottlenecks.  In contrast, cost fairness should lead to
 extremely unequal flow rates by design.  Equivalently, equal flow
 rates would typically be considered extremely unfair.
 The two traditional approaches are not protocol options that can each
 be followed in different parts of an internetwork.  They lead to
 research agendas that are different in their respective objectives,
 resulting in a different set of open issues.
 If we assume TCP-friendliness as a goal with flow rate as the metric,
 open issues would be:
  1. Should flow fairness depend on the packet rate or the bit rate?
  1. Should the target flow rate depend on RTT (as in TCP) or should

only flow dynamics depend on RTT (e.g., as in FAST TCP [Jin04])?

  1. How should we estimate whether a particular flow start strategy is

fair, or whether a particular fast recovery strategy after a

    reduction in rate due to congestion is fair?
  1. Should we judge what is reasonably fair if an application needs,

for example, even smoother flows than TFRC, or it needs to burst

    occasionally, or with any other application behavior?
  1. During brief congestion bursts (e.g., due to new flow arrivals),

how should we judge at what point it becomes unfair for some flows

    to continue at a smooth rate while others reduce their rate?
  1. Which mechanism(s) could be used to enforce approximate flow rate

fairness?

  1. Should we introduce some degree of fairness that takes into

account different users' flow activity over time?

  1. How should we judge the fairness of applications using a large

number of flows over separate paths (e.g., via an overlay)?

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 9] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 If we assume cost fairness as a goal with congestion-volume as the
 metric, open issues would be:
  1. Can one application's sensitivity to instantaneous congestion

really be protected by longer-term accountability of competing

    applications?
  1. Which protocol mechanism(s) are needed to give accountability for

causing congestion?

  1. How might we design one or two weighted transport protocols (such

as TCP, UDP, etc.) with the addition of application policy control

    over the weight?
  1. Which policy enforcement might be used by networks, and what are

the interactions between application policy and network policy

    enforcement?
  1. How should we design a new policy enforcement framework that will

appropriately compete with existing flows aiming for rate equality

    (e.g., TCP)?
 The question of how to reason about fairness is a prerequisite to
 agreeing on the research agenda.  If the relevant metric is flow
 rate, it places constraints at protocol design time, whereas if the
 metric is congestion-volume, the constraints move to run-time while
 design-time constraints can be relaxed [Bri08].  However, that
 question does not require more research in itself; it is merely a
 debate that needs to be resolved by studying existing research and by
 assessing how bad fairness problems could become if they are not
 addressed rigorously, and whether we can rely on trust to maintain
 approximate fairness without requiring policing complexity [RFC5290].
 The latter points may themselves lead to additional research.
 However, it is also accepted that more research will not necessarily
 lead to convincing either side to change their opinions.  More debate
 would be needed.  It seems also that if the architecture is built to
 support cost fairness, then equal instantaneous cost rates for flows
 sharing a bottleneck result in flow-rate fairness; that is, flow-rate
 fairness can be seen as a special case of cost fairness.  One can be
 used to build the other, but not vice-versa.

3. Detailed Challenges

3.1. Challenge 1: Network Support

 This challenge is perhaps the most critical to get right.  Changes to
 the balance of functions between the endpoints and network equipment
 could require a change to the per-datagram data plane interface

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 10] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 between the transport and network layers.  Network equipment vendors
 need to be assured that any new interface is stable enough (on decade
 timescales) to build into firmware and hardware, and operating-system
 vendors will not use a new interface unless it is likely to be widely
 deployed.
 Network components can be involved in congestion control in two ways:
 first, they can implicitly optimize their functions, such as queue
 management and scheduling strategies, in order to support the
 operation of end-to-end congestion control.  Second, network
 components can participate in congestion control via explicit
 signaling mechanisms.  Explicit signaling mechanisms, whether in-band
 or out-of-band, require a communication between network components
 and end-systems.  Signals realized within or over the IP layer are
 only meaningful to network components that process IP packets.  This
 always includes routers and potentially also middleboxes, but not
 pure link layer devices.  The following section distinguishes clearly
 between the term "network component" and the term "router"; the term
 "router" is used whenever the processing of IP packets is explicitly
 required.  One fundamental challenge of network-supported congestion
 control is that typically not all network components along a path are
 routers (cf. Section 3.1.3).
 The first (optimizing) category of implicit mechanisms can be
 implemented in any network component that processes and stores
 packets.  Various approaches have been proposed and also deployed,
 such as different AQM techniques.  Even though these implicit
 techniques are known to improve network performance during congestion
 phases, they are still only partly deployed in the Internet.  This
 may be due to the fact that finding optimal and robust
 parameterizations for these mechanisms is a non-trivial problem.
 Indeed, the problem with various AQM schemes is the difficulty in
 identifying correct values of the parameters that affect the
 performance of the queuing scheme (due to variation in the number of
 sources, the capacity, and the feedback delay) [Firoiu00] [Hollot01]
 [Zhang03].  Many AQM schemes (RED, REM, BLUE, and PI-Controller, but
 also Adaptive Virtual Queue (AVQ)) do not define a systematic rule
 for setting their parameters.
 The second class of approaches uses explicit signaling.  By using
 explicit feedback from the network, connection endpoints can obtain
 more accurate information about the current network characteristics
 on the path.  This allows endpoints to make more precise decisions
 that can better control congestion.

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 Explicit feedback techniques fall into three broad categories:
  1. Explicit congestion feedback: one-bit Explicit Congestion

Notification (ECN) [RFC3168] or proposals for more than one bit

    [Xia05];
  1. Explicit per-datagram rate feedback: the eXplicit Control Protocol

(XCP) [Katabi02] [Falk07], or the Rate Control Protocol (RCP)

    [Dukki05];
  1. Explicit rate feedback: by means of in-band signaling, such as by

Quick-Start [RFC4782], or by means of out-of-band signaling, e.g.,

    Congestion Avoidance with Distributed Proportional
    Control/Performance Transparency Protocol (CADPC/PTP) [Welzl03].
 Explicit router feedback can address some of the inherent
 shortcomings of TCP.  For instance, XCP was developed to overcome the
 inefficiency and instability that TCP suffers from when the per-flow
 bandwidth-delay product increases.  By decoupling resource
 utilization/congestion control from fairness control, XCP achieves
 equal bandwidth allocation, high utilization, a small standing queue
 size, and near-zero packet drops, with both steady and highly varying
 traffic.  Importantly, XCP does not maintain any per-flow state in
 routers and requires few CPU cycles per packet, hence making it
 potentially applicable in high-speed routers.  However, XCP is still
 subject to research: as [Andrew05] has pointed out, XCP is locally
 stable but globally unstable when the maximum RTT of a flow is much
 larger than the mean RTT.  This instability can be removed by
 changing the update strategy for the estimation interval, but this
 makes the system vulnerable to erroneous RTT advertisements.  The
 authors of [Pap02] have shown that when flows with different RTTs are
 applied, XCP sometimes discriminates among heterogeneous traffic
 flows, even if XCP generally equalizes rates among different flows.
 [Low05] provides for a complete characterization of the XCP
 equilibrium properties.
 Several other explicit router feedback schemes have been developed
 with different design objectives.  For instance, RCP uses per-packet
 feedback similar to XCP.  But unlike XCP, RCP focuses on the
 reduction of flow completion times [Dukki06], taking an optimistic
 approach to flows likely to arrive in the next RTT and tolerating
 larger instantaneous queue sizes [Dukki05].  XCP, on the other hand,
 gives very poor flow completion times for short flows.
 Both implicit and explicit router support should be considered in the
 context of the end-to-end argument [Saltzer84], which is one of the
 key design principles of the Internet.  It suggests that functions
 that can be realized both in the end-systems and in the network

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 12] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 should be implemented in the end-systems.  This principle ensures
 that the network provides a general service and that it remains as
 simple as possible (any additional complexity is placed above the IP
 layer, i.e., at the edges) so as to ensure evolvability, reliability,
 and robustness.  Furthermore, the fate-sharing principle ([Clark88],
 "Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols") mandates that an
 end-to-end Internet protocol design should not rely on the
 maintenance of any per-flow state (i.e., information about the state
 of the end-to-end communication) inside the network and that the
 network state (e.g., routing state) maintained by the Internet shall
 minimize its interaction with the states maintained at the
 endpoints/hosts [RFC1958].
 However, as discussed in [Moors02] for instance, congestion control
 cannot be realized as a pure end-to-end function only.  Congestion is
 an inherent network phenomenon and can only be resolved efficiently
 by some cooperation of end-systems and the network.  Congestion
 control in today's Internet protocols follows the end-to-end design
 principle insofar as only minimal feedback from the network is used,
 e.g., packet loss and delay.  The end-systems only decide how to
 react and how to avoid congestion.  The crux is that on the one hand,
 there would be substantial benefit by further assistance from the
 network, but, on the other hand, such network support could lead to
 duplication of functions, which might even harmfully interact with
 end-to-end protocol mechanisms.  The different requirements of
 applications (cf. the fairness discussion in Section 2.3) call for a
 variety of different congestion control approaches, but putting such
 per-flow behavior inside the network should be avoided, as such a
 design would clearly be at odds with the end-to-end and fate-sharing
 design principles.
 The end-to-end and fate-sharing principles are generally regarded as
 the key ingredients for ensuring a scalable and survivable network
 design.  In order to ensure that new congestion control mechanisms
 are scalable, violating these principles must therefore be avoided.
 For instance, protocols like XCP and RCP seem not to require flow
 state in the network, but this is only the case if the network trusts
 i) the receiver not to lie when feeding back the network's delta to
 the requested rate; ii) the source not to lie when declaring its
 rate; and iii) the source not to cheat when setting its rate in
 response to the feedback [Katabi04].

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 13] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 Solving these problems for non-cooperative environments like the
 public Internet requires flow state, at least on a sampled basis.
 However, because flows can create new identifiers whenever they want,
 sampling does not provide a deterrent -- a flow can simply cheat
 until it is discovered and then switch to a whitewashed identifier
 [Feldman04], and continue cheating until it is discovered again
 ([Bri09], S7.3).
 However, holding flow state in the network only seems to solve these
 policing problems in single autonomous system settings.  A
 multi-domain system would seem to require a completely different
 protocol structure, as the information required for policing is only
 seen as packets leave the internetwork, but the networks where
 packets enter will also want to police compliance.
 Even if a new protocol structure were found, it seems unlikely that
 network flow state could be avoided given the network's per-packet
 flow rate instructions would need to be compared against variations
 in the actual flow rate, which is inherently not a per-packet metric.
 These issues have been outstanding ever since integrated services
 (IntServ) was identified as unscalable in 1997 [RFC2208].  All
 subsequent attempts to involve network elements in limiting flow
 rates (XCP, RCP, etc.) will run up against the same open issue if
 anyone attempts to standardize them for use on the public Internet.
 In general, network support of congestion control raises many issues
 that have not been completely solved yet.

3.1.1. Performance and Robustness

 Congestion control is subject to some tradeoffs: on the one hand, it
 must allow high link utilizations and fair resource sharing, but on
 the other hand, the algorithms must also be robust.
 Router support can help to improve performance, but it can also
 result in additional complexity and more control loops.  This
 requires a careful design of the algorithms in order to ensure
 stability and avoid, e.g., oscillations.  A further challenge is the
 fact that feedback information may be imprecise.  For instance,
 severe congestion can delay feedback signals.  Also, in-network
 measurement of parameters such as RTTs or data rates may contain
 estimation errors.  Even though there has been significant progress
 in providing fundamental theoretical models for such effects,
 research has not completely explored the whole problem space yet.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 14] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 Open questions are:
  1. How much can network elements theoretically improve performance in

the complete range of communication scenarios that exist in the

    Internet without damaging or impacting end-to-end mechanisms
    already in place?
  1. Is it possible to design robust congestion control mechanisms that

offer significant benefits with minimum additional risks, even if

    Internet traffic patterns will change in the future?
  1. What is the minimum support that is needed from the network in

order to achieve significantly better performance than with end-

    to-end mechanisms and the current IP header limitations that
    provide at most unary ECN signals?

3.1.2. Granularity of Network Component Functions

 There are several degrees of freedom concerning the involvement of
 network entities, ranging from some few additional functions in
 network management procedures on the one end to additional per-packet
 processing on the other end of the solution space.  Furthermore,
 different amounts of state can be kept in routers (no per-flow state,
 partial per-flow state, soft state, or hard state).  The additional
 router processing is a challenge for Internet scalability and could
 also increase end-to-end latencies.
 Although there are many research proposals that do not require
 per-flow state and thus do not cause a large processing overhead,
 there are no known full solutions (i.e., including anti-cheating)
 that do not require per-flow processing.  Also, scalability issues
 could be caused, for instance, by synchronization mechanisms for
 state information among parallel processing entities, which are,
 e.g., used in high-speed router hardware designs.
 Open questions are:
  1. What granularity of router processing can be realized without

affecting Internet scalability?

  1. How can additional processing efforts be kept to a minimum?

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 15] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

3.1.3. Information Acquisition

 In order to support congestion control, network components have to
 obtain at least a subset of the following information.  Obtaining
 that information may result in complex tasks.
 1. Capacity of (outgoing) links
    Link characteristics depend on the realization of lower protocol
    layers.  Routers operating at the IP layer do not necessarily know
    the link layer network topology and link capacities, and these are
    not always constant (e.g., on shared wireless links or bandwidth-
    on-demand links).  Depending on the network technology, there can
    be queues or bottlenecks that are not directly visible at the IP
    networking layer.
    Difficulties also arise when using IP-in-IP tunnels [RFC2003],
    IPsec tunnels [RFC4301], IP encapsulated in the Layer Two
    Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) [RFC2661], Generic Routing Encapsulation
    (GRE) [RFC1701] [RFC2784], the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol
    (PPTP) [RFC2637], or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)
    [RFC3031] [RFC3032].  In these cases, link information could be
    determined by cross-layer information exchange, but this requires
    interfaces capable of processing link layer technology specific
    information.  An alternative could be online measurements, but
    this can cause significant additional network overhead.  It is an
    open research question as to how much, if any, online traffic
    measurement would be acceptable (at run-time).  Encapsulation and
    decapsulation of explicit congestion information have been
    specified for IP-in-IP tunnelling [RFC6040] and for MPLS-in-MPLS
    or MPLS-in-IP [RFC5129].
 2. Traffic carried over (outgoing) links
    Accurate online measurement of data rates is challenging when
    traffic is bursty.  For instance, measuring a "current link load"
    requires defining the right measurement interval / sampling
    interval.  This is a challenge for proposals that require
    knowledge, e.g., about the current link utilization.
 3. Internal buffer statistics
    Some proposals use buffer statistics such as a virtual queue
    length to trigger feedback.  However, network components can
    include multiple distributed buffer stages that make it difficult
    to obtain such metrics.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 16] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 Open questions are:
  1. Can and should this information be made available, e.g., by

additional interfaces or protocols?

  1. Which information is so important to higher-layer controllers that

machine architecture research should focus on designing to

    provide it?

3.1.4. Feedback Signaling

 Explicit notification mechanisms can be realized either by in-band
 signaling (notifications piggybacked along with the data traffic) or
 by out-of-band signaling [Sarola07].  The latter case requires
 additional protocols and a secure binding between the signals and the
 packets they refer to.  Out-of-band signaling can be further
 subdivided into path-coupled and path-decoupled approaches.
 Open questions concerning feedback signaling include:
  1. At which protocol layer should the feedback signaling occur

(IP/network layer assisted, transport layer assisted, hybrid

    solutions, shim layer, intermediate sub-layer, etc.)?  Should the
    feedback signaling be path-coupled or path-decoupled?
  1. What is the optimal frequency of feedback (only in case of

congestion events, per RTT, per packet, etc.)?

  1. What direction should feedback take (from network resource via

receiver to sender, or directly back to sender)?

3.2. Challenge 2: Corruption Loss

 It is common for congestion control mechanisms to interpret packet
 loss as a sign of congestion.  This is appropriate when packets are
 dropped in routers because of a queue that overflows, but there are
 other possible reasons for packet drops.  In particular, in wireless
 networks, packets can be dropped because of corruption loss,
 rendering the typical reaction of a congestion control mechanism
 inappropriate.  As a result, non-congestive loss may be more
 prevalent in these networks due to corruption loss (when the wireless
 link cannot be conditioned to properly control its error rate or due
 to transient wireless link interruption in areas of poor coverage).
 TCP over wireless and satellite is a topic that has been investigated
 for a long time [Krishnan04].  There are some proposals where the
 congestion control mechanism would react as if a packet had not been
 dropped in the presence of corruption (cf. TCP HACK [Balan01]), but

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 17] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 discussions in the IETF have shown (see, for instance, the discussion
 that occurred in April 2003 on the Datagram Congestion Control
 Protocol (DCCP) working group list
 http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/dccp/current/mail6.html) that
 there is no agreement that this type of reaction is appropriate.  For
 instance, it has been said that congestion can manifest itself as
 corruption on shared wireless links, and it is questionable whether a
 source that sends packets that are continuously impaired by link
 noise should keep sending at a high rate because it has lost the
 integrity of the feedback loop.
 Generally, two questions must be addressed when designing a
 congestion control mechanism that takes corruption loss into account:
 1. How is corruption detected?
 2. What should be the reaction?
 In addition to question 1 above, it may be useful to consider
 detecting the reason for corruption, but this has not yet been done
 to the best of our knowledge.
 Corruption detection can be done using an in-band or out-of-band
 signaling mechanism, much in the same way as described for
 Challenge 1.  Additionally, implicit detection can be considered:
 link layers sometimes retransmit erroneous frames, which can cause
 the end-to-end delay to increase -- but, from the perspective of a
 sender at the transport layer, there are many other possible reasons
 for such an effect.
 Header checksums provide another implicit detection possibility: if a
 checksum only covers all the necessary header fields and this
 checksum does not show an error, it is possible for errors to be
 found in the payload using a second checksum.  Such error detection
 is possible with UDP-Lite and DCCP; it was found to work well over a
 General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network in a study [Chester04]
 and poorly over a WiFi network in another study [Rossi06] [Welzl08].
 Note that while UDP-Lite and DCCP enable the detection of corruption,
 the specifications of these protocols do not foresee any specific
 reaction to it for the time being.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 18] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 The idea of having a transport endpoint detecting and accordingly
 reacting (or not) to corruption poses a number of interesting
 questions regarding cross-layer interactions.  As IP is designed to
 operate over arbitrary link layers, it is therefore difficult to
 design a congestion control mechanism on top of it that appropriately
 reacts to corruption -- especially as the specific data link layers
 that are in use along an end-to-end path are typically unknown to
 entities at the transport layer.
 While the IETF has not yet specified how a congestion control
 mechanism should react to corruption, proposals exist in the
 literature, e.g., [Tickoo05].  For instance, TCP Westwood [Mascolo01]
 sets the congestion window equal to the measured bandwidth at the
 time of congestion in response to three DupACKs or a timeout.  This
 measurement is obtained by counting and filtering the ACK rate.  This
 setting provides a significant goodput improvement in noisy channels
 because the "blind" by half window reduction of standard TCP is
 avoided, i.e., the window is not reduced by too much.
 Open questions concerning corruption loss include:
  1. How should corruption loss be detected?
  1. How should a source react when it is known that corruption has

occurred?

  1. Can an ECN-capable flow infer that loss must be due to corruption

just from lack of explicit congestion notifications around a loss

    episode [Tickoo05]?  Or could this inference be dangerous, given
    the transport does not know whether all queues on the path are
    ECN-capable or not?

3.3. Challenge 3: Packet Size

 TCP does not take packet size into account when responding to losses
 or ECN.  Over past years, the performance of TCP congestion avoidance
 algorithms has been extensively studied.  The well-known "square root
 formula" provides an estimation of the performance of the TCP
 congestion avoidance algorithm for TCP Reno [RFC2581].  [Padhye98]
 enhances the model to account for timeouts, receiver window, and
 delayed ACKs.
 For the sake of the present discussion, we will assume that the TCP
 throughput is expressed using the simplified formula.  Using this
 formula, the TCP throughput B is proportional to the segment size and
 inversely proportional to the RTT and the square root of the drop
 probability:

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 19] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

              S     1
       B ~ C --- -------
             RTT sqrt(p)
  where
       C     is a constant
       S     is the TCP segment size (in bytes)
       RTT   is the end-to-end round-trip time of the TCP
             connection (in seconds)
       p     is the packet drop probability
 Neglecting the fact that the TCP rate linearly depends on it,
 choosing the ideal packet size is a tradeoff between high throughput
 (the larger a packet, the smaller the relative header overhead) and
 low packet latency (the smaller a packet, the shorter the time that
 is needed until it is filled with data).  Observing that TCP is not
 optimal for applications with streaming media (since reliable
 in-order delivery and congestion control can cause arbitrarily long
 delays), this tradeoff has not usually been considered for TCP
 applications.  Therefore, the influence of the packet size on the
 sending rate has not typically been seen as a significant issue,
 given there are still few paths through the Internet that support
 packets larger than the 1500 bytes common with Ethernet.
 The situation is already different for the Datagram Congestion
 Control Protocol (DCCP) [RFC4340], which has been designed to enable
 unreliable but congestion-controlled datagram transmission, avoiding
 the arbitrary delays associated with TCP.  DCCP is intended for
 applications such as streaming media that can benefit from control
 over the tradeoffs between delay and reliable in-order delivery.
 DCCP provides for a choice of modular congestion control mechanisms.
 DCCP uses Congestion Control Identifiers (CCIDs) to specify the
 congestion control mechanism.  Three profiles are currently
 specified:
  1. DCCP Congestion Control ID 2 (CCID 2) [RFC4341]: TCP-like

Congestion Control. CCID 2 sends data using a close approximation

    of TCP's congestion control as well as incorporating a variant of
    Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) [RFC2018] [RFC3517].  CCID 2 is
    suitable for senders that can adapt to the abrupt changes in the
    congestion window typical of TCP's AIMD congestion control, and
    particularly useful for senders that would like to take advantage
    of the available bandwidth in an environment with rapidly changing
    conditions.

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  1. DCCP Congestion Control ID 3 (CCID 3) [RFC4342]: TCP-Friendly Rate

Control (TFRC) [RFC5348] is a congestion control mechanism

    designed for unicast flows operating in a best-effort Internet
    environment.  When competing for bandwidth, its window is similar
    to TCP flows but has a much lower variation of throughput over
    time than TCP, making it more suitable for applications such as
    streaming media where a relatively smooth sending rate is of
    importance.  CCID 3 is appropriate for flows that would prefer to
    minimize abrupt changes in the sending rate, including streaming
    media applications with small or moderate receiver buffering
    before playback.
  1. DCCP Congestion Control ID 4 (CCID 4) [RFC5622]: TFRC Small

Packets (TFRC-SP) [RFC4828], a variant of the TFRC mechanism, has

    been designed for applications that exchange small packets.  The
    objective of TFRC-SP is to achieve the same bandwidth in bits per
    second as a TCP flow using packets of up to 1500 bytes.  TFRC-SP
    enforces a minimum interval of 10 ms between data packets to
    prevent a single flow from sending small packets arbitrarily
    frequently.  CCID 4 has been designed to be used either by
    applications that use a small fixed segment size, or by
    applications that change their sending rate by varying the segment
    size.  Because CCID 4 is intended for applications that use a
    fixed small segment size, or that vary their segment size in
    response to congestion, the transmit rate derived from the TCP
    throughput equation is reduced by a factor that accounts for the
    packet header size, as specified in [RFC4828].
 The resulting open questions are:
  1. How does TFRC-SP operate under various network conditions?
  1. How can congestion control be designed so as to scale with packet

size (dependency of congestion algorithm on packet size)?

 Today, many network resources are designed so that packet processing
 cannot be overloaded even for incoming loads at the maximum bit rate
 of the line.  If packet processing can handle sustained load r
 [packet per second] and the minimum packet size is h [bit] (i.e.,
 frame, packet, and transport headers with no payload), then a line
 rate of x [bit per second] will never be able to overload packet
 processing as long as x =< r*h.
 However, realistic equipment is often designed to only cope with a
 near-worst-case workload with a few larger packets in the mix, rather
 than the worst-case scenario of all minimum-size packets.  In this
 case, x = r*(h + e) for some small value of e.  Therefore, packet
 congestion is not impossible for runs of small packets (e.g., TCP

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 21] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 ACKs or denial-of-service (DoS) attacks with TCP SYNs or small UDP
 datagrams).  But absent such anomalous workloads, equipment vendors
 at the 2008 ICCRG meeting believed that equipment could still be
 designed so that any congestion should be due to bit overload and not
 packet overload.
 This observation raises additional open issues:
  1. Can bit congestion remain prevalent?
    Being able to assume that congestion is generally due to excess
    bits and not excess packets is a useful simplifying assumption in
    the design of congestion control protocols.  Can we rely on this
    assumption for the future?  An alternative view is that in-network
    processing will become commonplace, so that per-packet processing
    will as likely be the bottleneck as per-bit transmission [Shin08].
    Over the last three decades, performance gains have mainly been
    achieved through increased packet rates and not bigger packets.
    But if bigger maximum segment sizes do become more prevalent, tiny
    segments (e.g., ACKs) will not stop being widely used -- leading
    to a widening range of packet sizes.
    The open question is thus whether or not packet processing rates
    (r) will keep up with growth in transmission rates (x).  A
    superficial look at Moore's Law-type trends would suggest that
    processing (r) will continue to outstrip growth in transmission
    (x).  But predictions based on actual knowledge of technology
    futures would be useful.  Another open question is whether there
    are likely to be more small packets in the average packet mix.  If
    the answers to either of these questions predict that packet
    congestion could become prevalent, congestion control protocols
    will have to be more complicated.
  1. Confusable causes of loss
    There is a considerable body of research on how to distinguish
    whether packet drops are due to transmission corruption or to
    congestion.  But the full list of confusable causes of loss is
    longer and includes transmission corruption loss, congestion loss
    (bit congestion and packet congestion), and policing loss.
    If congestion is due to excess bits, the bit rate should be
    reduced.  If congestion is due to excess packets, the packet rate
    can be reduced without reducing the bit rate -- by using larger
    packets.  However, if the transport cannot tell which of these
    causes led to a specific packet drop, its only safe response is to
    reduce the bit rate.  This is why the Internet would be more

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 22] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

    complicated if packet congestion were prevalent, as reducing the
    bit rate normally also reduces the packet rate, while reducing the
    packet rate does not necessarily reduce the bit rate.
    Given distinguishing between corruption loss and congestion is
    already an open issue (Section 3.2), if that problem is ever
    solved, a further open issue would be whether to standardize a
    solution that distinguishes all the above causes of loss, and not
    just two of them.
    Nonetheless, even if we find a way for network equipment to
    explicitly distinguish which sort of loss has occurred, we will
    never be able to assume that such a smart AQM solution is deployed
    at every congestible resource throughout the Internet -- at every
    higher-layer device like firewalls, proxies, and servers; and at
    every lower-layer device like low-end hubs, DSLAMs, Wireless LAN
    (WLAN) cards, cellular base-stations, and so on.  Thus, transport
    protocols will always have to cope with packet drops due to
    unpredictable causes, so we should always treat AQM as an
    optimization, given it will never be ubiquitous throughout the
    public Internet.
  1. What does a congestion notification on a packet of a certain size

mean?

    The open issue here is whether a loss or explicit congestion mark
    should be interpreted as a single congestion event irrespective of
    the size of the packet lost or marked, or whether the strength of
    the congestion notification is weighted by the size of the packet.
    This issue is discussed at length in [Bri10], along with other
    aspects of packet size and congestion control.
    [Bri10] makes the strong recommendation that network equipment
    should drop or mark packets with a probability independent of each
    specific packet's size, while congestion controls should respond
    to dropped or marked packets in proportion to the packet's size.
  1. Packet size and congestion control protocol design
    If the above recommendation is correct -- that the packet size of
    a congestion notification should be taken into account when the
    transport reads, and not when the network writes, the notification
    -- it opens up a significant problem of protocol engineering and
    re-engineering.  Indeed, TCP does not take packet size into
    account when responding to losses or ECN.  At present, this is not
    a pressing problem because use of 1500 byte data segments is very
    prevalent for TCP, and the incidence of alternative maximum

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 23] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

    segment sizes is not large.  However, we should design the
    Internet's protocols so they will scale with packet size.  So, an
    open issue is whether we should evolve TCP to be sensitive to
    packet size, or expect new protocols to take over.
    As we continue to standardize new congestion control protocols, we
    must then face the issue of how they should account for packet
    size.  It is still an open research issue to establish whether TCP
    was correct in not taking packet size into account.  If it is
    determined that TCP was wrong in this respect, we should
    discourage future protocol designs from following TCP's example.
    For example, as explained above, the small-packet variant of TCP-
    friendly rate control (TFRC-SP [RFC4828]) is an experimental
    protocol that aims to take packet size into account.  Whatever
    packet size it uses, it ensures that its rate approximately equals
    that of a TCP using 1500 byte segments.  This raises the further
    question of whether TCP with 1500 byte segments will be a suitable
    long-term gold standard, or whether we need a more thorough review
    of what it means for a congestion control mechanism to scale with
    packet size.

3.4. Challenge 4: Flow Startup

 The beginning of data transmissions imposes some further, unique
 challenges: when a connection to a new destination is established,
 the end-systems have hardly any information about the characteristics
 of the path in between and the available bandwidth.  In this flow
 startup situation, there is no obvious choice as to how to start to
 send.  A similar problem also occurs after relatively long idle
 times, since the congestion control state then no longer reflects
 current information about the state of the network (flow restart
 problem).
 Van Jacobson [Jacobson88] suggested using the slow-start mechanism
 both for the flow startup and the flow restart, and this is today's
 standard solution [RFC2581] [RFC5681].  Per [RFC5681], the slow-start
 algorithm is used when the congestion window (cwnd) < slow-start
 threshold (ssthresh), whose initial value is set arbitrarily high
 (e.g., to the size of the largest possible advertised window) and
 reduced in response to congestion.  During slow-start, TCP increments
 the cwnd by at most Sender Maximum Segment Size (MSS) bytes for each
 ACK received that cumulatively acknowledges new data.  Slow-start
 ends when cwnd exceeds ssthresh or when congestion is observed.
 However, the slow-start is not optimal in many situations.  First, it
 can take quite a long time until a sender can fully utilize the
 available bandwidth on a path.  Second, the exponential increase may
 be too aggressive and cause multiple packet loss if large congestion

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 24] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 windows are reached (slow-start overshooting).  Finally, the slow-
 start does not ensure that new flows converge quickly to a reasonable
 share of resources, particularly when the new flows compete with
 long-lived flows and come out of slow-start early (slow-start vs
 overshoot tradeoff).  This convergence problem may even worsen if
 more aggressive congestion control variants are widely used.
 The slow-start and its interaction with the congestion avoidance
 phase was largely designed by intuition [Jacobson88].  So far, little
 theory has been developed to understand the flow startup problem and
 its implication on congestion control stability and fairness.  There
 is also no established methodology to evaluate whether new flow
 startup mechanisms are appropriate or not.
 As a consequence, it is a non-trivial task to address the
 shortcomings of the slow-start algorithm.  Several experimental
 enhancements have been proposed, such as congestion window validation
 [RFC2861] and limited slow-start [RFC3742].  There are also ongoing
 research activities, focusing, e.g., on bandwidth estimation
 techniques, delay-based congestion control, or rate-pacing
 mechanisms.  However, any alternative end-to-end flow startup
 approach has to cope with the inherent problem that there is no or
 only little information about the path at the beginning of a data
 transfer.  This uncertainty could be reduced by more expressive
 feedback signaling (cf. Section 3.1).  For instance, a source could
 learn the path characteristics faster with the Quick-Start mechanism
 [RFC4782].  But even if the source knew exactly what rate it should
 aim for, it would still not necessarily be safe to jump straight to
 that rate.  The end-system still does not know how a change in its
 own rate will affect the path, which also might become congested in
 less than one RTT.  Further research would be useful to understand
 the effect of decreasing the uncertainty by explicit feedback
 separately from control theoretic stability questions.  Furthermore,
 flow startup also raises fairness questions.  For instance, it is
 unclear whether it could be reasonable to use a faster startup when
 an end-system detects that a path is currently not congested.
 In summary, there are several topics for further research concerning
 flow startup:
  1. Better theoretical understanding of the design and evaluation of

flow startup mechanisms, concerning their impact on congestion

    risk, stability, and fairness.
  1. Evaluating whether it may be appropriate to allow alternative

starting schemes, e.g., to allow higher initial rates under

    certain constraints [Chu10]; this also requires refining the
    definition of fairness for startup situations.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 25] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

  1. Better theoretical models for the effects of decreasing

uncertainty by additional network feedback, particularly if the

    path characteristics are very dynamic.

3.5. Challenge 5: Multi-Domain Congestion Control

 Transport protocols such as TCP operate over the Internet, which is
 divided into autonomous systems.  These systems are characterized by
 their heterogeneity as IP networks are realized by a multitude of
 technologies.

3.5.1. Multi-Domain Transport of Explicit Congestion Notification

 Different conditions and their variations lead to correlation effects
 between policers that regulate traffic against certain conformance
 criteria.
 With the advent of techniques allowing for early detection of
 congestion, packet loss is no longer the sole metric of congestion.
 ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) marks packets -- set by active
 queue management techniques -- to convey congestion information,
 trying to prevent packet losses (packet loss and the number of
 packets marked gives an indication of the level of congestion).
 Using TCP ACKs to feed back that information allows the hosts to
 realign their transmission rate and thus encourages them to
 efficiently use the network.  In IP, ECN uses the two least
 significant bits of the (former) IPv4 Type of Service (TOS) octet or
 the (former) IPv6 Traffic Class octet [RFC2474] [RFC3260].  Further,
 ECN in TCP uses two bits in the TCP header that were previously
 defined as reserved [RFC793].
 ECN [RFC3168] is an example of a congestion feedback mechanism from
 the network toward hosts.  The congestion-based feedback scheme,
 however, has limitations when applied on an inter-domain basis.
 Indeed, Sections 8 and 19 of [RFC3168] detail the implications of two
 possible attacks:
 1. non-compliance: a network erasing a Congestion Experienced (CE)
    codepoint introduced earlier on the path, and
 2. subversion: a network changing Not ECN-Capable Transport (Not-ECT)
    to ECT.
 Both of these problems could allow an attacking network to cause
 excess congestion in an upstream network, even if the transports were
 behaving correctly.  There are to date two possible solutions to the
 non-compliance problem (number 1 above): the ECN-nonce [RFC3540] and
 the [CONEX] work item inspired by the re-ECN incentive system

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 26] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Bri09].  Nevertheless, accidental rather than malicious erasure of
 ECN is an issue for IPv6 where the absence of an IPv6 header checksum
 implies that corruption of ECN could be more impacting than in the
 IPv4 case.
 Fragmentation is another issue: the ECN-nonce cannot protect against
 misbehaving receivers that conceal marked fragments; thus, some
 protection is lost in situations where path MTU discovery is
 disabled.  Note also that ECN-nonce wouldn't protect against the
 subversion issue (number 2 above) because, by definition, a Not-ECT
 packet comes from a source without ECN enabled, and therefore without
 the ECN-nonce enabled.  So, there is still room for improvement on
 the ECN mechanism when operating in multi-domain networks.
 Operational/deployment experience is nevertheless required to
 determine the extent of these problems.  The second problem is mainly
 related to deployment and usage practices and does not seem to result
 in any specific research challenge.
 Another controversial solution in a multi-domain environment may be
 the TCP rate controller (TRC), a traffic conditioner that regulates
 the TCP flow at the ingress node in each domain by controlling packet
 drops and delays of the packets in a flow.  The outgoing traffic from
 a TRC-controlled domain is shaped in such a way that no packets are
 dropped at the policer.  However, the TRC interferes with the end-to-
 end TCP model, and thus it would interfere with past and future
 diversity of TCP implementations (violating the end-to-end
 principle).  In particular, the TRC embeds the flow rate equality
 view of fairness in the network, and would prevent evolution to forms
 of fairness based on congestion-volume (Section 2.3).

3.5.2. Multi-Domain Exchange of Topology or Explicit Rate Information

 Security is a challenge for multi-domain exchange of explicit rate
 signals, whether in-band or out-of-band.  At domain boundaries,
 authentication and authorization issues can arise whenever congestion
 control information is exchanged.  From this perspective, the
 Internet does not so far have any security architecture for this
 problem.
 The future evolution of Internet inter-domain operation has to show
 whether more multi-domain information exchange can be effectively
 realized.  This is of particular importance for congestion control
 schemes that make use of explicit per-datagram rate feedback (e.g.,
 RCP or XCP) or explicit rate feedback that uses in-band congestion
 signaling (e.g., Quick-Start) or out-of-band signaling (e.g.,
 CADPC/PTP).  Explicit signaling exchanges at the inter-domain level
 that result in local domain triggers are currently absent from the

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 27] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 Internet.  From this perspective, security issues resulting from
 limited trust between different administrative units result in policy
 enforcement that exacerbates the difficulty encountered when explicit
 feedback congestion control information is exchanged between domains.
 Note that even though authentication mechanisms could be extended for
 this purpose (by recognizing that explicit rate schemes such as RCP
 or XCP have the same inter-domain security requirements and structure
 as IntServ), they suffer from the same scalability problems as
 identified in [RFC2208].  Indeed, in-band rate signaling or out-of-
 band per-flow traffic specification signaling (like in the Resource
 Reservation Protocol (RSVP)) results in similar scalability issues
 (see Section 3.1).
 Also, many autonomous systems only exchange some limited amount of
 information about their internal state (topology hiding principle),
 even though having more precise information could be highly
 beneficial for congestion control.  Indeed, revealing the internal
 network structure is highly sensitive in multi-domain network
 operations and thus also a concern when it comes to the deployability
 of congestion control schemes.  For instance, a network-assisted
 congestion control scheme with explicit signaling could reveal more
 information about the internal network dimensioning than TCP does
 today.

3.5.3. Multi-Domain Pseudowires

 Extending pseudowires across multiple domains poses specific issues.
 Pseudowires (PWs) [RFC3985] may carry non-TCP data flows (e.g., Time-
 Division Multiplexing (TDM) traffic or Constant Bit Rate (CBR) ATM
 traffic) over a multi-domain IP network.  Structure-Agnostic TDM over
 Packet (SAToP) [RFC4553], Circuit Emulation Service over Packet
 Switched Network (CESoPSN) [RFC5086], and TDM over IP (TDMoIP)
 [RFC5087] are not responsive to congestion control as discussed in
 [RFC2914] (see also [RFC5033]).  The same observation applies to ATM
 circuit emulating services (CESs) interconnecting CBR equipment
 (e.g., Private Branch Exchanges (PBX)) across a Packet Switched
 Network (PSN).
 Moreover, it is not possible to simply reduce the flow rate of a TDM
 PW or an ATM PW when facing packet loss.  Providers can rate-control
 corresponding incoming traffic, but they may not be able to detect
 that PWs carry TDM or CBR ATM traffic (mechanisms for characterizing
 the traffic's temporal properties may not necessarily be supported).

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 28] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 This can be illustrated with the following example.
              ...........       ............
             .           .     .
      S1 --- E1 ---      .     .
             .     |     .     .
             .      === E5 === E7 ---
             .     |     .     .     |
      S2 --- E2 ---      .     .     |
             .           .     .     |      |
              ...........      .     |      v
 .                                    ----- R --->
              ...........      .     |      ^
             .           .     .     |      |
      S3 --- E3 ---      .     .     |
             .     |     .     .     |
             .      === E6 === E8 ---
             .     |     .     .
      S4 --- E4 ---      .     .
             .           .     .
              ...........       ............
             \---- P1 ---/     \---------- P2 -----
 Sources S1, S2, S3, and S4 are originating TDM over IP traffic.  P1
 provider edges E1, E2, E3, and E4 are rate-limiting such traffic.
 The Service Level Agreement (SLA) of provider P1 with transit
 provider P2 is such that the latter assumes a BE traffic pattern and
 that the distribution shows the typical properties of common BE
 traffic (elastic, non-real time, non-interactive).
 The problem arises for transit provider P2 because it is not able to
 detect that IP packets are carrying constant-bit-rate service traffic
 for which the only useful congestion control mechanism would rely on
 implicit or explicit admission control, meaning self-blocking or
 enforced blocking, respectively.
 Assuming P1 providers are rate-limiting BE traffic, a transit P2
 provider router R may be subject to serious congestion as all TDM PWs
 cross the same router.  TCP-friendly traffic (e.g., each flow within
 another PW) would follow TCP's AIMD algorithm of reducing the sending
 rate by half, in response to each packet drop.  Nevertheless, the PWs
 carrying TDM traffic could take all the available capacity while
 other more TCP-friendly or generally congestion-responsive traffic
 reduced itself to nothing.  Note here that the situation may simply
 occur because S4 suddenly turns on additional TDM channels.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 29] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 It is neither possible nor desirable to assume that edge routers will
 soon have the ability to detect the responsiveness of the carried
 traffic, but it is still important for transit providers to be able
 to police a fair, robust, responsive, and efficient congestion
 control technique in order to avoid impacting congestion-responsive
 Internet traffic.  However, we must not require only certain specific
 responses to congestion to be embedded within the network, which
 would harm evolvability.  So designing the corresponding mechanisms
 in the data and control planes still requires further investigation.

3.6. Challenge 6: Precedence for Elastic Traffic

 Traffic initiated by so-called elastic applications adapts to the
 available bandwidth using feedback about the state of the network.
 For elastic applications, the transport dynamically adjusts the data
 traffic sending rate to different network conditions.  Examples
 encompass short-lived elastic traffic including HTTP and instant-
 messaging traffic, as well as long file transfers with FTP and
 applications targeted by [LEDBAT].  In brief, elastic data
 applications can show extremely different requirements and traffic
 characteristics.
 The idea to distinguish several classes of best-effort traffic types
 is rather old, since it would be beneficial to address the relative
 delay sensitivities of different elastic applications.  The notion of
 traffic precedence was already introduced in [RFC791], and it was
 broadly defined as "An independent measure of the importance of this
 datagram".  For instance, low-precedence traffic should experience
 lower average throughput than higher-precedence traffic.  Several
 questions arise here: What is the meaning of "relative"?  What is the
 role of the transport layer?
 The preferential treatment of higher-precedence traffic combined with
 appropriate congestion control mechanisms is still an open issue that
 may, depending on the proposed solution, impact both the host and the
 network precedence awareness, and thereby congestion control.
 [RFC2990] points out that the interactions between congestion control
 and DiffServ [RFC2475] remained unaddressed until recently.
 Recently, a study and a potential solution have been proposed that
 introduce Guaranteed TFRC (gTFRC) [Lochin06].  gTFRC is an adaptation
 of TCP-Friendly Rate Control providing throughput guarantees for
 unicast flows over the DiffServ/Assured Forwarding (AF) class.  The
 purpose of gTFRC is to distinguish the guaranteed part from the best-
 effort part of the traffic resulting from AF conditioning.  The
 proposed congestion control has been specified and tested inside
 DCCP/CCID 3 for DiffServ/AF networks [Lochin07] [Jourjon08].

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 Nevertheless, there is still work to be performed regarding lower-
 precedence traffic -- data transfers that are useful, yet not
 important enough to warrant significantly impairing other traffic.
 Examples of applications that could make use of such traffic are web
 caches and web browsers (e.g., for pre-fetching) as well as peer-to-
 peer applications.  There are proposals for achieving low precedence
 on a pure end-to-end basis (e.g., TCP Low Priority (TCP-LP)
 [Kuzmanovic03]), and there is a specification for achieving it via
 router mechanisms [RFC3662].  It seems, however, that network-based
 lower-precedence mechanisms are not yet a common service on the
 Internet.  Since early 2010, end-to-end mechanisms for lower
 precedence, e.g., [Shal10], have become common -- at least when
 competing with other traffic as part of its own queues (e.g., in a
 home router).  But it is less clear whether users will be willing to
 make their background traffic yield to other people's foreground
 traffic, unless the appropriate incentives are created.
 There is an issue over how to reconcile two divergent views of the
 relation between traffic class precedence and congestion control.
 One view considers that congestion signals (losses or explicit
 notifications) in one traffic class are independent of those in
 another.  The other relates marking of the classes together within
 the active queue management (AQM) mechanism [Gibbens02].  In the
 independent case, using a higher-precedence class of traffic gives a
 higher scheduling precedence and generally lower congestion level.
 In the linked case, using a higher-precedence class of traffic still
 gives higher scheduling precedence, but results in a higher level of
 congestion.  This higher congestion level reflects the extra
 congestion higher-precedence traffic causes to both classes combined.
 The linked case separates scheduling precedence from rate control.
 The end-to-end congestion control algorithm can separately choose to
 take a higher rate by responding less to the higher level of
 congestion.  This second approach could become prevalent if weighted
 congestion controls were common.  However, it is an open issue how
 the two approaches might co-exist or how one might evolve into the
 other.

3.7. Challenge 7: Misbehaving Senders and Receivers

 In the current Internet architecture, congestion control depends on
 parties acting against their own interests.  It is not in a
 receiver's interest to honestly return feedback about congestion on
 the path, effectively requesting a slower transfer.  It is not in the
 sender's interest to reduce its rate in response to congestion if it
 can rely on others to do so.  Additionally, networks may have
 strategic reasons to make other networks appear congested.

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 Numerous strategies to improve congestion control have already been
 identified.  The IETF has particularly focused on misbehaving TCP
 receivers that could confuse a compliant sender into assigning
 excessive network and/or server resources to that receiver (e.g.,
 [Savage99], [RFC3540]).  But, although such strategies are worryingly
 powerful, they do not yet seem common (however, evidence of attack
 prevalence is itself a research requirement).
 A growing proportion of Internet traffic comes from applications
 designed not to use congestion control at all, or worse, applications
 that add more forward error correction as they experience more
 losses.  Some believe the Internet was designed to allow such
 freedom, so it can hardly be called misbehavior.  But others consider
 it misbehavior to abuse this freedom [RFC3714], given one person's
 freedom can constrain the freedom of others (congestion represents
 this conflict of interests).  Indeed, leaving freedom unchecked might
 result in congestion collapse in parts of the Internet.
 Proportionately, large volumes of unresponsive voice traffic could
 represent such a threat, particularly for countries with less
 generous provisioning [RFC3714].  Also, Internet video on demand
 services that transfer much greater data rates without congestion
 control are becoming popular.  In general, it is recommended that
 such UDP applications use some form of congestion control [RFC5405].
 Note that the problem is not just misbehavior driven by a self-
 interested desire for more bandwidth.  Indeed, congestion control may
 be attacked by someone who makes no gain for themselves, other than
 the satisfaction of harming others (see Security Considerations in
 Section 4).
 Open research questions resulting from these considerations are:
  1. By design, new congestion control protocols need to enable one end

to check the other for protocol compliance. How would such

    mechanisms be designed?
  1. Which congestion control primitives could safely satisfy more

demanding applications (smoother than TFRC, faster than high-speed

    TCPs), so that application developers and users do not turn off
    congestion control to get the rate they expect and need?
 Note also that self-restraint could disappear from the Internet.  So,
 it may no longer be sufficient to rely on developers/users
 voluntarily submitting themselves to congestion control.  As a
 consequence, mechanisms to enforce fairness (see Sections 2.3, 3.4,
 and 3.5) need to have more emphasis within the research agenda.

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3.8. Other Challenges

 This section provides additional challenges and open research issues
 that are not (at this point in time) deemed so significant, or they
 are of a different nature compared to the main challenges depicted
 so far.

3.8.1. RTT Estimation

 Several congestion control schemes have to precisely know the round-
 trip time (RTT) of a path.  The RTT is a measure of the current delay
 on a network.  It is defined as the delay between the sending of a
 packet and the reception of a corresponding response, if echoed back
 immediately by the receiver upon receipt of the packet.  This
 corresponds to the sum of the one-way delay of the packet and the
 (potentially different) one-way delay of the response.  Furthermore,
 any RTT measurement also includes some additional delay due to the
 packet processing in both end-systems.
 There are various techniques to measure the RTT: active measurements
 inject special probe packets into the network and then measure the
 response time, using, e.g., ICMP.  In contrast, passive measurements
 determine the RTT from ongoing communication processes, without
 sending additional packets.
 The connection endpoints of transport protocols such as TCP, the
 Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), and DCCP, as well as
 several application protocols, keep track of the RTT in order to
 dynamically adjust protocol parameters such as the retransmission
 timeout (RTO) or the rate-control equation.  They can implicitly
 measure the RTT on the sender side by observing the time difference
 between the sending of data and the arrival of the corresponding
 acknowledgments.  For TCP, this is the default RTT measurement
 procedure; it is used in combination with Karn's algorithm, which
 prohibits RTT measurements from retransmitted segments [RFC2988].
 Traditionally, TCP implementations take one RTT measurement at a time
 (i.e., about once per RTT).  As an alternative, the TCP timestamp
 option [RFC1323] allows more frequent explicit measurements, since a
 sender can safely obtain an RTT sample from every received
 acknowledgment.  In principle, similar measurement mechanisms are
 used by protocols other than TCP.
 Sometimes it would be beneficial to know the RTT not only at the
 sender, but also at the receiver, e.g., to find the one-way variation
 in delay due to one-way congestion.  A passive receiver can deduce
 some information about the RTT by analyzing the sequence numbers of
 received segments.  But this method is error-prone and only works if
 the sender permanently sends data.  Other network entities on the

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 path can apply similar heuristics in order to approximate the RTT of
 a connection, but this mechanism is protocol-specific and requires
 per-connection state.  In the current Internet, there is no simple
 and safe solution to determine the RTT of a connection in network
 entities other than the sender.  The more fundamental question is to
 determine whether it is necessary or not for network elements to
 measure or know the RTT.
 As outlined earlier in this document, the round-trip time is
 typically not a constant value.  For a given path, there is a
 theoretical minimum value, which is given by the minimum
 transmission, processing, and propagation delay on that path.
 However, additional variable delays might be caused by congestion,
 cross-traffic, shared-media access control schemes, recovery
 procedures, or other sub-IP layer mechanisms.  Furthermore, a change
 of the path (e.g., route flapping, hand-over in mobile networks) can
 result in completely different delay characteristics.
 Due to this variability, one single measured RTT value is hardly
 sufficient to characterize a path.  This is why many protocols use
 RTT estimators that derive an averaged value and keep track of a
 certain history of previous samples.  For instance, TCP endpoints
 derive a smoothed round-trip time (SRTT) from an exponential weighted
 moving average [RFC2988].  Such a low-pass filter ensures that
 measurement noise and single outliers do not significantly affect the
 estimated RTT.  Still, a fundamental drawback of low-pass filters is
 that the averaged value reacts more slowly to sudden changes in the
 measured RTT.  There are various solutions to overcome this effect:
 For instance, the standard TCP retransmission timeout calculation
 considers not only the SRTT, but also a measure for the variability
 of the RTT measurements [RFC2988].  Since this algorithm is not well
 suited for frequent RTT measurements with timestamps, certain
 implementations modify the weight factors (e.g., [Sarola02]).  There
 are also proposals for more sophisticated estimators, such as Kalman
 filters or estimators that utilize mainly peak values.
 However, open questions related to RTT estimation in the Internet
 remain:
  1. Optimal measurement frequency: Currently, there is no theory or

common understanding of the right time scale of RTT measurement.

    In particular, the necessity for rather frequent measurements
    (e.g., per packet) is not well understood.  There is some
    empirical evidence that such frequent sampling may not have a
    significant benefit [Allman99].

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 34] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

  1. Filter design: A closely related question is how to design good

filters for the measured samples. The existing algorithms are

    known to be robust, but they are far from being perfect.  The
    fundamental problem is that there is no single set of RTT values
    that could characterize the Internet as a whole, i.e., it is hard
    to define a design target.
  1. Default values: RTT estimators can fail in certain scenarios,

e.g., when any feedback is missing. In this case, default values

    have to be used.  Today, most default values are set to
    conservative values that may not be optimal for most Internet
    communication.  Still, the impact of more aggressive settings is
    not well understood.
  1. Clock granularities: RTT estimation depends on the clock

granularities of the protocol stacks. Even though there is a

    trend toward higher-precision timers, limited granularity
    (particularly on low-cost devices) may still prevent highly
    accurate RTT estimations.

3.8.2. Malfunctioning Devices

 There is a long history of malfunctioning devices harming the
 deployment of new and potentially beneficial functionality in the
 Internet.  Sometimes, such devices drop packets or even crash
 completely when a certain mechanism is used, causing users to opt for
 reliability instead of performance and disable the mechanism, or
 operating-system vendors to disable it by default.  One well-known
 example is ECN, whose deployment was long hindered by malfunctioning
 firewalls and is still hindered by malfunctioning home-hubs, but
 there are many other examples (e.g., the Window Scaling option of
 TCP) [Thaler07].
 As new congestion control mechanisms are developed with the intention
 of eventually seeing them deployed in the Internet, it would be
 useful to collect information about failures caused by devices of
 this sort, analyze the reasons for these failures, and determine
 whether there are ways for such devices to do what they intend to do
 without causing unintended failures.  Recommendations for vendors of
 these devices could be derived from such an analysis.  It would also
 be useful to see whether there are ways for failures caused by such
 devices to become more visible to endpoints, or to the maintainers of
 such devices.
 A possible way to reduce such problems in the future would be
 guidelines for standards authors to ensure that "forward
 compatibility" is considered in all IETF work.  That is, the default
 behavior of a device should be precisely defined for all possible

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 values and combinations of protocol fields, and not just the minimum
 necessary for the protocol being defined.  Then, when previously
 unused or reserved fields start to be used by newer devices to comply
 with a new standard, older devices encountering unusual fields should
 at least behave predictably.

3.8.3. Dependence on RTT

 AIMD window algorithms that have the goal of packet conservation end
 up converging on a rate that is inversely proportional to RTT.
 However, control theoretic approaches to stability have shown that
 only the increase in rate (acceleration), and not the target rate,
 needs to be inversely proportional to RTT [Jin04].
 It is possible to have more aggressive behaviors for some demanding
 applications as long as they are part of a mix with less aggressive
 transports [Key04].  This beneficial effect of transport type mixing
 is probably how the Internet currently manages to remain stable even
 in the presence of TCP slow-start, which is more aggressive than the
 theory allows for stability.  Research giving deeper insight into
 these aspects would be very useful.

3.8.4. Congestion Control in Multi-Layered Networks

 A network of IP nodes is just as vulnerable to congestion in the
 lower layers between IP-capable nodes as it is to congestion on the
 IP-capable nodes themselves.  If network elements take a greater part
 in congestion control (ECN, XCP, RCP, etc. -- see Section 3.1), these
 techniques will either need to be deployed at lower layers as well,
 or they will need to interwork with lower-layer mechanisms.
 [RFC5129] shows how to propagate ECN from lower layers upwards for
 the specific case of MPLS, but to the authors' knowledge the layering
 problem has not been addressed for explicit rate protocol proposals
 such as XCP and RCP.  Some issues are straightforward matters of
 interoperability (e.g., how exactly to copy fields up the layers)
 while others are less obvious (e.g., re-framing issues: if RCP were
 deployed in a lower layer, how might multiple small RCP frames, all
 with different rates in their headers, be assembled into a larger IP
 layer datagram?).
 Multi-layer considerations also confound many mechanisms that aim to
 discover whether every node on the path supports a new congestion
 control protocol.  For instance, some proposals maintain a secondary
 Time to Live (TTL) field parallel to that in the IP header.  Any
 nodes that support the new behavior update both TTL fields, whereas
 legacy IP nodes will only update the IP TTL field.  This allows the
 endpoints to check whether all IP nodes on the path support the new

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 36] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 behavior, in which case both TTLs will be equal at the receiver.  But
 mechanisms like these overlook nodes at lower layers that might not
 support the new behavior.
 A further related issue is congestion control across overlay networks
 of relays [Hilt08] [Noel07] [Shen08].
 Section 3.5.3 deals with inelastic multi-domain pseudowires (PWs),
 where the identity of the pseudowire itself implies the
 characteristics of the traffic crossing the multi-domain PSN
 (independently of the actual characteristics of the traffic carried
 in the PW).  A more complex situation arises when inelastic traffic
 is carried as part of a pseudowire (e.g., inelastic traffic over
 Ethernet PW over PSN) whose edges do not have the means to
 characterize the properties of the traffic encapsulated in the
 Ethernet frames.  In this case, the problem explained in
 Section 3.5.3 is not limited to multi-domain pseudowires but more
 generally arises from a "pseudowire carrying inelastic traffic"
 (whether over a single- or multi-domain PSN).
 The problem becomes even more intricate when the Ethernet PW carries
 both inelastic and elastic traffic.  Addressing this issue further
 supports our observation that a general framework to efficiently deal
 with congestion control problems in multi-layer networks without
 harming evolvability is absolutely necessary.

3.8.5. Multipath End-to-End Congestion Control and Traffic Engineering

 Recent work has shown that multipath endpoint congestion control
 [Kelly05] offers considerable benefits in terms of resilience and
 resource usage efficiency.  The IETF has since initiated a work item
 on multipath TCP [MPTCP].  By pooling the resources on all paths,
 even nodes not using multiple paths benefit from those that are.
 There is considerable further research to do in this area,
 particularly to understand interactions with network-operator-
 controlled route provisioning and traffic engineering, and indeed
 whether multipath congestion control can perform better traffic
 engineering than the network itself, given the right incentives
 [Arkko09].

3.8.6. ALGs and Middleboxes

 An increasing number of application layer gateways (ALGs),
 middleboxes, and proxies (see Section 3.6 of [RFC2775]) are deployed
 at domain boundaries to verify conformance but also filter traffic

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 37] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 and control flows.  One motivation is to prevent information beyond
 routing data leaking between autonomous systems.  These systems split
 up end-to-end TCP connections and disrupt end-to-end congestion
 control.  Furthermore, transport over encrypted tunnels may not allow
 other network entities to participate in congestion control.
 Basically, such systems disrupt the primal and dual congestion
 control components.  In particular, end-to-end congestion control may
 be replaced by flow-control backpressure mechanisms on the split
 connections.  A large variety of ALGs and middleboxes use such
 mechanisms to improve the performance of applications (Performance
 Enhancing Proxies, Application Accelerators, etc.).  However, the
 implications of such mechanisms, which are often proprietary and not
 documented, have not been studied systematically so far.
 There are two levels of interference:
  1. The "transparent" case, i.e., the endpoint address from the sender

perspective is still visible to the receiver (the destination IP

    address).  Relay systems that intercept payloads but do not relay
    congestion control information provide an example.  Such
    middleboxes can prevent the operation of end-to-end congestion
    control.
  1. The "non-transparent" case, which causes fewer problems for

congestion control. Although these devices interfere with end-to-

    end network transparency, they correctly terminate network,
    transport, and application layer protocols on both sides, which
    individually can be congestion controlled.

4. Security Considerations

 Misbehavior may be driven by pure malice, or malice may in turn be
 driven by wider selfish interests, e.g., using distributed denial-of-
 service (DDoS) attacks to gain rewards by extortion [RFC4948].  DDoS
 attacks are possible both because of vulnerabilities in operating
 systems and because the Internet delivers packets without requiring
 congestion control.
 To date, compliance with congestion control rules and being fair
 require endpoints to cooperate.  The possibility of uncooperative
 behavior can be regarded as a security issue; its implications are
 discussed throughout these documents in a scattered fashion.
 Currently the focus of the research agenda against denial of service
 is about identifying attack-packets that attack machines and the
 networks hosting them, with a particular focus on mitigating source
 address spoofing.  But if mechanisms to enforce congestion control

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 38] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 fairness were robust to both selfishness and malice [Bri06], they
 would also naturally mitigate denial of service against the network,
 which can be considered (from the perspective of a well-behaved
 Internet user) as a congestion control enforcement problem.  Even
 some denial-of-service attacks on hosts (rather than the network)
 could be considered as a congestion control enforcement issue at the
 higher layer.  But clearly there are also denial-of-service attacks
 that would not be solved by enforcing congestion control.
 Sections 3.5 and 3.7 on multi-domain issues and misbehaving senders
 and receivers also discuss some information security issues suffered
 by various congestion control approaches.

5. References

5.1. Informative References

 [Allman99]  Allman, M. and V. Paxson, "On Estimating End-to-End
             Network Path Properties", Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'99,
             September 1999.
 [Andrew05]  Andrew, L., Wydrowski, B., and S. Low, "An Example of
             Instability in XCP", Manuscript available at
             <http://netlab.caltech.edu/maxnet/XCP_instability.pdf>.
 [Arkko09]   Arkko, J., Briscoe, B., Eggert, L., Feldmann, A., and M.
             Handley, "Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on End-to-End
             Protocols for the Future Internet," ACM SIGCOMM Computer
             Communication Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 42-47, April
             2009.
 [Ath01]     Athuraliya, S., Low, S., Li, V., and Q. Yin, "REM: Active
             Queue Management", IEEE Network Magazine, Vol. 15, No. 3,
             pp. 48-53, May 2001.
 [Balan01]   Balan, R.K., Lee, B.P., Kumar, K.R.R., Jacob, L., Seah,
             W.K.G., and A.L. Ananda, "TCP HACK: TCP Header Checksum
             Option to Improve Performance over Lossy Links",
             Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'01, Anchorage (Alaska), USA,
             April 2001.
 [Bonald00]  Bonald, T., May, M., and J.-C. Bolot, "Analytic
             Evaluation of RED Performance", Proceedings of IEEE
             INFOCOM'00, Tel Aviv, Israel, March 2000.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 39] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Bri06]     Briscoe, B., "Using Self-interest to Prevent Malice;
             Fixing the Denial of Service Flaw of the Internet",
             Workshop on the Economics of Securing the Information
             Infrastructure, October 2006,
             <http://wesii.econinfosec.org/draft.php?paper_id=19>.
 [Bri07]     Briscoe, B., "Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a
             Religion", ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review,
             Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 63-74, April 2007.
 [Bri08]     Briscoe, B., Moncaster, T. and L. Burness, "Problem
             Statement: Transport Protocols Don't Have To Do
             Fairness", Work in Progress, July 2008.
 [Bri09]     Briscoe, B., "Re-feedback: Freedom with Accountability
             for Causing Congestion in a Connectionless Internetwork",
             UCL PhD Thesis (2009).
 [Bri10]     Briscoe, B. and J. Manner, "Byte and Packet Congestion
             Notification," Work in Progress, October 2010.
 [Chester04] Chesterfield, J., Chakravorty, R., Banerjee, S.,
             Rodriguez, P., Pratt, I., and J. Crowcroft, "Transport
             level optimisations for streaming media over wide-area
             wireless networks", WIOPT'04, March 2004.
 [Chhabra02] Chhabra, P., Chuig, S., Goel, A., John, A., Kumar, A.,
             Saran, H., and R. Shorey, "XCHOKe: Malicious Source
             Control for Congestion Avoidance at Internet Gateways,"
             Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Network
             Protocols (ICNP'02), Paris, France, November 2002.
 [Chiu89]    Chiu, D.M. and R. Jain, "Analysis of the increase and
             decrease algorithms for congestion avoidance in computer
             networks", Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 17,
             pp. 1-14, 1989.
 [Clark88]   Clark, D., "The design philosophy of the DARPA internet
             protocols", ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review,
             Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 106-114, August 1988.
 [Clark98]   Clark, D. and W. Fang, "Explicit Allocation of Best-
             Effort Packet Delivery Service", IEEE/ACM Transactions on
             Networking, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 362-373, August 1998.
 [Chu10]     Chu, J., Dukkipati, N., Cheng, Y., and M. Mathis,
             "Increasing TCP's Initial Window", Work in Progress,
             October 2010.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 40] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [CONEX]     IETF WG Action: Congestion Exposure (conex).
 [Dukki05]   Dukkipati, N., Kobayashi, M., Zhang-Shen, R., and N.
             McKeown, "Processor Sharing Flows in the Internet",
             Proceedings of International Workshop on Quality of
             Service (IWQoS'05), Passau, Germany, June 2005.
 [Dukki06]   Dukkipati, N. and N. McKeown, "Why Flow-Completion Time
             is the Right Metric for Congestion Control", ACM SIGCOMM
             Computer Communication Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, January
             2006.
 [ECODE]     "ECODE Project", European Commission Seventh Framework
             Program, Grant No. 223936, <http://www.ecode-project.eu>.
 [Falk07]    Falk, A., Pryadkin, Y., and D. Katabi, "Specification for
             the Explicit Control Protocol (XCP)", Work in Progress,
             January 2007.
 [Feldman04]
             Feldman, M., Papadimitriou, C., Chuang, J., and I.
             Stoica, "Free-Riding and Whitewashing in Peer-to-Peer
             Systems" Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Practice
             and Theory of Incentives in Networked Systems (PINS'04)
             2004.
 [Firoiu00]  Firoiu, V. and M. Borden, "A Study of Active Queue
             Management for Congestion Control", Proceedings of IEEE
             INFOCOM'00, Tel Aviv, Israel, March 2000.
 [Floyd93]   Floyd, S. and V. Jacobson, "Random early detection
             gateways for congestion avoidance", IEEE/ACM Transactions
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 [Floyd94]   Floyd, S., "TCP and Explicit Congestion Notification",
             ACM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 24, No. 5,
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 [Gibbens02] Gibbens, R. and Kelly, F., "On Packet Marking at Priority
             Queues", IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 47,
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 [Ha08]      Ha, S., Rhee, I., and L. Xu, "CUBIC: A new TCP-friendly
             high-speed TCP variant", ACM SIGOPS Operating System
             Review, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp. 64-74, 2008.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 41] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Hilt08]    Hilt, V. and I. Widjaja, "Controlling Overload in
             Networks of SIP Servers", Proceedings of IEEE
             International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'08),
             Orlando (Florida), USA, October 2008.
 [Hollot01]  Hollot, C., Misra, V., Towsley, D., and W.-B. Gong, "A
             Control Theoretic Analysis of RED", Proceedings of IEEE
             INFOCOM'01, Anchorage (Alaska), USA, April 2001.
 [Jacobson88]
             Jacobson, V., "Congestion Avoidance and Control",
             Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'88 Symposium, August 1988.
 [Jain88]    Jain, R. and K. Ramakrishnan, "Congestion Avoidance in
             Computer Networks with a Connectionless Network Layer:
             Concepts, Goals, and Methodology", Proceedings of IEEE
             Computer Networking Symposium, Washington DC, USA, April
             1988.
 [Jain90]    Jain, R., "Congestion Control in Computer Networks:
             Trends and Issues", IEEE Network, pp. 24-30, May 1990.
 [Jin04]     Jin, Ch., Wei, D.X., and S. Low, "FAST TCP: Motivation,
             Architecture, Algorithms, Performance", Proceedings of
             IEEE INFOCOM'04, Hong-Kong, China, March 2004.
 [Jourjon08] Jourjon, G., Lochin, E., and P. Senac, "Design,
             Implementation and Evaluation of a QoS-aware Transport
             Protocol", Elsevier Computer Communications, Vol. 31,
             No. 9, pp. 1713-1722, June 2008.
 [Katabi02]  Katabi, D., M. Handley, and C. Rohrs, "Internet
             Congestion Control for Future High Bandwidth-Delay
             Product Environments", Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'02
             Symposium, August 2002.
 [Katabi04]  Katabi, D., "XCP Performance in the Presence of Malicious
             Flows", Proceedings of PFLDnet'04 Workshop, Argonne
             (Illinois), USA, February 2004.
 [Kelly05]   Kelly, F. and Th. Voice, "Stability of end-to-end
             algorithms for joint routing and rate control", ACM
             SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 35, No. 2,
             pp. 5-12, April 2005.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 42] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Kelly98]   Kelly, F., Maulloo, A., and D. Tan, "Rate control in
             communication networks: shadow prices, proportional
             fairness, and stability", Journal of the Operational
             Research Society, Vol. 49, pp. 237-252, 1998.
 [Keshav07]  Keshav, S., "What is congestion and what is congestion
             control", Presentation at IRTF ICCRG Workshop, PFLDnet
             2007, Los Angeles (California), USA, February 2007.
 [Key04]     Key, P., Massoulie, L., Bain, A., and F. Kelly, "Fair
             Internet Traffic Integration: Network Flow Models and
             Analysis", Annales des Telecommunications, Vol. 59,
             No. 11-12, pp. 1338-1352, November-December 2004.
 [Krishnan04]
             Krishnan, R., Sterbenz, J., Eddy, W., Partridge, C., and
             M. Allman, "Explicit Transport Error Notification (ETEN)
             for Error-Prone Wireless and Satellite Networks",
             Computer Networks, Vol. 46, No. 3, October 2004.
 [Kuzmanovic03]
             Kuzmanovic, A. and E.W. Knightly, "TCP-LP: A Distributed
             Algorithm for Low Priority Data Transfer", Proceedings of
             IEEE INFOCOM'03, San Francisco (California), USA, April
             2003.
 [LEDBAT]    IETF WG Action: Low Extra Delay Background Transport
             (ledbat).
 [Lochin06]  Lochin, E., Dairaine, L., and G. Jourjon, "Guaranteed TCP
             Friendly Rate Control (gTFRC) for DiffServ/AF Network",
             Work in Progress, August 2006.
 [Lochin07]  Lochin, E., Jourjon, G., and L. Dairaine, "Study and
             enhancement of DCCP over DiffServ Assured Forwarding
             class", 4th Conference on Universal Multiservice Networks
             (ECUMN 2007), Toulouse, France, February 2007.
 [Low02]     Low, S., Paganini, F., Wang, J., Adlakha, S., and J.C.
             Doyle, "Dynamics of TCP/RED and a Scalable Control",
             Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'02, New York (New Jersey),
             2002.
 [Low03.1]   Low, S., "A duality model of TCP and queue management
             algorithms", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking,
             Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 525-536, August 2003.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 43] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Low03.2]   Low, S., Paganini, F., Wang, J., and J. Doyle, "Linear
             stability of TCP/RED and a scalable control", Computer
             Networks Journal, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 633-647, December
             2003.
 [Low05]     Low, S., Andrew, L., and B. Wydrowski, "Understanding
             XCP: equilibrium and fairness", Proceedings of IEEE
             INFOCOM'05, Miami (Florida), USA, March 2005.
 [MacK95]    MacKie-Mason, J. and H. Varian, "Pricing Congestible
             Network Resources", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
             Communications, Advances in the Fundamentals of
             Networking, Vol. 13, No. 7, pp. 1141-1149, 1995.
 [Mascolo01] Mascolo, S., Casetti, Cl., Gerla M., Sanadidi, M.Y., and
             R. Wang, "TCP Westwood: Bandwidth estimation for enhanced
             transport over wireless links", Proceedings of MOBICOM
             2001, Rome, Italy, July 2001.
 [Moors02]   Moors, T., "A critical review of "End-to-end arguments in
             system design"", Proceedings of IEEE International
             Conference on Communications (ICC) 2002, New York City
             (New Jersey), USA, April/May 2002.
 [MPTCP]     IETF WG Action: Multipath TCP (mptcp).
 [Noel07]    Noel, E. and C. Johnson, "Initial Simulation Results That
             Analyze SIP Based VoIP Networks Under Overload",
             International Teletraffic Congress (ITC'07), Ottawa,
             Canada, June 2007.
 [Padhye98]  Padhye, J., Firoiu, V., Towsley, D., and J. Kurose,
             "Modeling TCP Throughput: A Simple Model and Its
             Empirical Validation", University of Massachusetts
             (UMass), CMPSCI Tech. Report TR98-008, February 1998.
 [Pan00]     Pan, R., Prabhakar, B., and K. Psounis, "CHOKe: a
             stateless AQM scheme for approximating fair bandwidth
             allocation", Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'00, Tel Aviv,
             Israel, March 2000.
 [Pap02]     Papadimitriou, I. and G. Mavromatis, "Stability of
             Congestion Control Algorithms using Control Theory with
             an application to XCP", Technical Report, 2002.
             <http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee384y/projects/
             reports/ionnis.pdf>.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 44] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [RFC791]    Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791,
             September 1981.
 [RFC793]    Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
             RFC 793, September 1981.
 [RFC1323]   Jacobson, V., Braden, R., and D. Borman, "TCP Extensions
             for High Performance", RFC 1323, May 1992.
 [RFC1701]   Hanks, S., Li, T., Farinacci, D., and P. Traina, "Generic
             Routing Encapsulation (GRE)", RFC 1701, October 1994.
 [RFC1958]   Carpenter, B., Ed., "Architectural Principles of the
             Internet", RFC 1958, June 1996.
 [RFC2003]   Perkins, C., "IP Encapsulation within IP", RFC 2003,
             October 1996.
 [RFC2018]   Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., and A. Romanow, "TCP
             Selective Acknowledgment Options", RFC 2018, October
             1996.
 [RFC2208]   Mankin, A., Ed., Baker, F., Braden, B., Bradner, S.,
             O'Dell, M., Romanow, A., Weinrib, A., and L. Zhang,
             "Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) -- Version 1
             Applicability Statement Some Guidelines on Deployment",
             RFC 2208, September 1997.
 [RFC2474]   Nichols, K., Blake, S., Baker, F., and D. Black,
             "Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS
             Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers", RFC 2474, December
             1998.
 [RFC2475]   Blake, S., Black, D., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, Z.,
             and W. Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated
             Service", RFC 2475, December 1998.
 [RFC2581]   Allman, M., Paxson, V., and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion
             Control", RFC 2581, April 1999.
 [RFC2637]   Hamzeh, K., Pall, G., Verthein, W., Taarud, J., Little,
             W., and G. Zorn, "Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol
             (PPTP)", RFC 2637, July 1999.
 [RFC2661]   Townsley, W., Valencia, A., Rubens, A., Pall, G., Zorn,
             G., and B. Palter, "Layer Two Tunneling Protocol "L2TP"",
             RFC 2661, August 1999.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 45] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [RFC2775]   Carpenter, B., "Internet Transparency", RFC 2775,
             February 2000.
 [RFC2784]   Farinacci, D., Li, T., Hanks, S., Meyer, D., and P.
             Traina, "Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)", RFC 2784,
             March 2000.
 [RFC2861]   Handley, M., Padhye, J., and S. Floyd, "TCP Congestion
             Window Validation", RFC 2861, June 2000.
 [RFC2914]   Floyd, S., "Congestion Control Principles", BCP 41,
             RFC 2914, September 2000.
 [RFC2988]   Paxson, V. and M. Allman, "Computing TCP's Retransmission
             Timer", RFC 2988, November 2000.
 [RFC2990]   Huston, G., "Next Steps for the IP QoS Architecture",
             RFC 2990, November 2000.
 [RFC3031]   Rosen, E., Viswanathan, A., and R. Callon, "Multiprotocol
             Label Switching Architecture", RFC 3031, January 2001.
 [RFC3032]   Rosen, E., Tappan, D., Fedorkow, G., Rekhter, Y.,
             Farinacci, D., Li, T., and A. Conta, "MPLS Label Stack
             Encoding", RFC 3032, January 2001.
 [RFC3168]   Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S., and D. Black, "The Addition
             of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP",
             RFC 3168, September 2001.
 [RFC3260]   Grossman, D., "New Terminology and Clarifications for
             Diffserv", RFC 3260, April 2002.
 [RFC3517]   Blanton, E., Allman, M., Fall, K., and L. Wang, "A
             Conservative Selective Acknowledgment (SACK)-based Loss
             Recovery Algorithm for TCP", RFC 3517, April 2003.
 [RFC3540]   Spring, N., Wetherall, D., and D. Ely, "Robust Explicit
             Congestion Notification (ECN) Signaling with Nonces",
             RFC 3540, June 2003.
 [RFC3662]   Bless, R., Nichols, K., and K. Wehrle, "A Lower Effort
             Per-Domain Behavior (PDB) for Differentiated Services",
             RFC 3662, December 2003.
 [RFC3714]   Floyd, S., Ed., and J. Kempf, Ed., "IAB Concerns
             Regarding Congestion Control for Voice Traffic in the
             Internet", RFC 3714, March 2004.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 46] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [RFC3742]   Floyd, S., "Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large
             Congestion Windows", RFC 3742, March 2004.
 [RFC3985]   Bryant, S., Ed., and P. Pate, Ed., "Pseudo Wire Emulation
             Edge-to-Edge (PWE3) Architecture", RFC 3985, March 2005.
 [RFC4301]   Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the
             Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005.
 [RFC4340]   Kohler, E., Handley, M., and S. Floyd, "Datagram
             Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)", RFC 4340, March
             2006.
 [RFC4341]   Floyd, S. and E. Kohler, "Profile for Datagram Congestion
             Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion Control ID 2: TCP-like
             Congestion Control", RFC 4341, March 2006.
 [RFC4342]   Floyd, S., Kohler, E., and J. Padhye, "Profile for
             Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion
             Control ID 3: TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC)",
             RFC 4342, March 2006.
 [RFC4553]   Vainshtein, A., Ed., and YJ. Stein, Ed., "Structure-
             Agnostic Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) over Packet
             (SAToP)", RFC 4553, June 2006.
 [RFC4614]   Duke, M., Braden, R., Eddy, W., and E. Blanton, "A
             Roadmap for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
             Specification Documents", RFC 4614, September 2006.
 [RFC4782]   Floyd, S., Allman, M., Jain, A., and P. Sarolahti,
             "Quick-Start for TCP and IP", RFC 4782, January 2007.
 [RFC4828]   Floyd, S. and E. Kohler, "TCP Friendly Rate Control
             (TFRC): The Small-Packet (SP) Variant", RFC 4828, April
             2007.
 [RFC4948]   Andersson, L., Davies, E., and L. Zhang, "Report from the
             IAB workshop on Unwanted Traffic March 9-10, 2006",
             RFC 4948, August 2007.
 [RFC5033]   Floyd, S. and M. Allman, "Specifying New Congestion
             Control Algorithms", BCP 133, RFC 5033, August 2007.
 [RFC5086]   Vainshtein, A., Ed., Sasson, I., Metz, E., Frost, T., and
             P. Pate, "Structure-Aware Time Division Multiplexed (TDM)
             Circuit Emulation Service over Packet Switched Network
             (CESoPSN)", RFC 5086, December 2007.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 47] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [RFC5087]   Stein, Y(J)., Shashoua, R., Insler, R., and M. Anavi,
             "Time Division Multiplexing over IP (TDMoIP)", RFC 5087,
             December 2007.
 [RFC5129]   Davie, B., Briscoe, B., and J. Tay, "Explicit Congestion
             Marking in MPLS", RFC 5129, January 2008.
 [RFC5290]   Floyd, S. and M. Allman, "Comments on the Usefulness of
             Simple Best-Effort Traffic", RFC 5290, July 2008.
 [RFC5348]   Floyd, S., Handley, M., Padhye, J., and J. Widmer, "TCP
             Friendly Rate Control (TFRC): Protocol Specification",
             RFC 5348, September 2008.
 [RFC5405]   Eggert, L. and G. Fairhurst, "Unicast UDP Usage
             Guidelines for Application Designers", BCP 145, RFC 5405,
             November 2008.
 [RFC5622]   Floyd, S. and E. Kohler, "Profile for Datagram Congestion
             Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion ID 4: TCP-Friendly
             Rate Control for Small Packets (TFRC-SP)", RFC 5622,
             August 2009.
 [RFC5681]   Allman, M., Paxson, V., and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion
             Control", RFC 5681 (Obsoletes RFC 2581), September 2009.
 [RFC5783]   Welzl, M. and W. Eddy, "Congestion Control in the RFC
             Series", RFC 5783, February 2010.
 [RFC6040]   Briscoe, B., "Tunnelling of Explicit Congestion
             Notification", RFC 6040, November 2010.
 [Rossi06]   Rossi, M., "Evaluating TCP with Corruption Notification
             in an IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN", Master Thesis,
             University of Innsbruck, November 2006.  Available from
             http://heim.ifi.uio.no/michawe/research/projects/
             corruption/.
 [Saltzer84] Saltzer, J., Reed, D., and D. Clark, "End-to-end
             arguments in system design", ACM Transactions on Computer
             Systems, Vol. 2, No. 4, November 1984.
 [Sarola02]  Sarolahti, P. and A. Kuznetsov, "Congestion Control in
             Linux TCP", Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical
             Conference, 2002.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 48] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Sarola07]  Sarolahti, P., Floyd, S., and M. Kojo, "Transport-layer
             Considerations for Explicit Cross-layer Indications",
             Work in Progress, March 2007.
 [Savage99]  Savage, S., Cardwell, N., Wetherall, D., and T.
             Anderson, "TCP Congestion Control with a Misbehaving
             Receiver", ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review,
             1999.
 [Shal10]    Shalunov, S., Hazel, G., and J. Iyengar, "Low Extra Delay
             Background Transport (LEDBAT)", Work in Progress, October
             2010.
 [Shen08]    Shen, C., Schulzrinne, H., and E. Nahum, "Session
             Initiation Protocol (SIP) Server Overload Control: Design
             and Evaluation, Principles", Systems and Applications of
             IP Telecommunications (IPTComm'08), Heidelberg, Germany,
             July 2008.
 [Shin08]    Shin, M., Chong, S., and I. Rhee, "Dual-Resource TCP/AQM
             for Processing-Constrained Networks", IEEE/ACM
             Transactions on Networking, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 435-449,
             April 2008.
 [Thaler07]  Thaler, D., Sridharan, M., and D. Bansal, "Implementation
             Report on Experiences with Various TCP RFCs",
             Presentation to the IETF Transport Area, March 2007.
             <http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/07mar/
             slides/tsvarea-3/>.
 [Tickoo05]  Tickoo, O., Subramanian, V., Kalyanaraman, S., and K.K.
             Ramakrishnan, "LT-TCP: End-to-End Framework to Improve
             TCP Performance over Networks with Lossy Channels",
             Proceedings of International Workshop on QoS (IWQoS),
             Passau, Germany, June 2005.
 [TRILOGY]   "Trilogy Project", European Commission Seventh Framework
             Program (FP7), Grant No: 216372, <http://www.trilogy-
             project.org>.
 [Vinnic02]  Vinnicombe, G., "On the stability of networks operating
             TCP-like congestion control," Proceedings of IFAC World
             Congress, Barcelona, Spain, 2002.
 [Welzl03]   Welzl, M., "Scalable Performance Signalling and
             Congestion Avoidance", Springer (ISBN 1-4020-7570-7),
             September 2003.

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 49] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

 [Welzl08]   Welzl, M., Rossi, M., Fumagalli, A., and M. Tacca,
             "TCP/IP over IEEE 802.11b WLAN: the Challenge of
             Harnessing Known-Corrupt Data", Proceedings of IEEE
             International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2008,
             Beijing, China, May 2008.
 [Xia05]     Xia, Y., Subramanian, L., Stoica, I., and S.
             Kalyanaraman, "One more bit is enough", ACM SIGCOMM
             Computer Communication Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 37-48,
             2005.
 [Zhang03]   Zhang, H., Towsley, D., Hollot, C., and V. Misra, "A
             Self-Tuning Structure for Adaptation in TCP/AQM
             Networks", Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS'03 Conference,
             San Diego (California), USA, June 2003.

6. Acknowledgments

 The authors would like to thank the following people whose feedback
 and comments contributed to this document: Keith Moore, Jan
 Vandenabeele, and Larry Dunn (his comments at the Manchester ICCRG
 and discussions with him helped with the section on packet-
 congestibility).
 Dimitri Papadimitriou's contribution was partly funded by [ECODE], a
 Seventh Framework Program (FP7) research project sponsored by the
 European Commission.
 Bob Briscoe's contribution was partly funded by [TRILOGY], a research
 project supported by the European Commission.
 Michael Scharf is now with Alcatel-Lucent.

7. Contributors

 The following additional people have contributed to this document:
  1. Wesley Eddy weddy@grc.nasa.gov
  1. Bela Berde bela.berde@gmx.de
  1. Paulo Loureiro loureiro.pjg@gmail.com
  1. Chris Christou christou_chris@bah.com

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 50] RFC 6077 Open Issues in Internet Congestion Control February 2011

Authors' Addresses

 Dimitri Papadimitriou (editor)
 Alcatel-Lucent
 Copernicuslaan, 50
 2018 Antwerpen, Belgium
 Phone: +32 3 240 8491
 EMail: dimitri.papadimitriou@alcatel-lucent.com
 Michael Welzl
 University of Oslo, Department of Informatics
 PO Box 1080 Blindern
 N-0316 Oslo, Norway
 EMail: michawe@ifi.uio.no
 Michael Scharf
 University of Stuttgart
 Pfaffenwaldring 47
 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
 EMail: michael.scharf@googlemail.com
 Bob Briscoe
 BT & UCL
 B54/77, Adastral Park
 Martlesham Heath
 Ipswich IP5 3RE, UK
 EMail: bob.briscoe@bt.com

Papadimitriou, et al. Informational [Page 51]

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