Are we heading towards a BBR-dominant internet?

2018 30th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 30), 2018

A recently proposed congestion control algorithm (CCA) called BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time) has shown a lot of promise in avoiding some of the problems that have plagued loss-based CCAs. Nevertheless, deployment of a new alternative algorithm requires a thorough evaluation of the effect of the proposed alternative on established transport protocols like TCP CUBIC. Furthermore, evaluations that consider the heterogeneity of Internet traffic sizes would provide a useful insight into the deployability of an algorithm that introduces sweeping changes across multiple algorithm components. Yet, most evaluations of BBR's impact and competitive fairness have focused on the steady-state performance of large flows. This work expands on previous studies of BBR by evaluating BBR's impact when the traffic consists of flows of different sizes. Our experiments show that under certain circumstances BBR's startup phase can result in a significant reduction of the throughput of competing large CUBIC flows and the utilization of the bottleneck link. In addition, the steady-state operation of BBR can have negative impact on the performance of bursty flows using loss-based CCAs over bottlenecks with buffer sizes as high as two times the bandwidth-delay product.

International Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology, 2023

As the demand for high-performance internet applications continues to surge, the efficiency of network congestion control algorithms becomes a critical factor in ensuring a seamless user experience. This research paper delves into the comparative analysis of two prominent congestion control mechanisms: BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round- trip propagation time) and Cubic[1]. Both algorithms play pivotal roles in regulating data flow within networks, but their approaches differ significantly. The comparison section highlights the adaptive behavior of each algorithm, emphasizing real-world implications for diverse network scenarios. The discussion interprets the findings, offering a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both BBR and Cubic, thereby contributing to the broader discourse on congestion control strategies.

2021

The Internet’s congestion control landscape is currently in the midst of an unprecedented paradigm shift. A recent measurement study found that BBR, a congestion control algorithm introduced by Google in 2016, has seen rapid adoption and is deployed at more than 20% of the Alexa Top 20,000 websites. Encouraging early deployment results fromGoogle, Dropbox and Spotify suggest that BBR could potentially replace traditional loss-based congestion control algorithms like CUBIC. In this paper, we study the interactions between CUBIC and BBR and show that the underlying interactions can be modeled as a normal form game. Our game-theoretic analysis and testbed measurements suggest that while BBR seems to achieve somewhat better performance than CUBIC on the Internet today, this advantage will decrease as the proportion of BBR flows increases. The distribution of congestion control algorithms on the Internet would likely reach a Nash Equilibrium, where no flow has the incentive to switch fro...

2009

A few months ago, the BitTorrent developers announced that the transfer of torrent data in the official client was about to switch to uTP, an application-layer congestion-control protocol using UDP at the transport-layer. This announcement immediately raised an unmotivated buzz about a new, imminent congestion collapse of the whole Internet. Though this reaction was not built on solid technical foundation, nevertheless a legitimate question remains: i.e., whether this novel algorithm is a necessary building block for future Internet applications, or whether it may result in an umpteenth addition to the already well populated world of Internet congestion control algorithms.

IEEE Access, 2021

Google proposed a bottleneck bandwidth round-trip propagation time (BBR) for TCP to replace the loss-based congestion control algorithms, such as Reno and CUBIC. Unlike the loss-based algorithms, BBR models a network path from source to destination and dynamically controls the sending rate using control parameters, such as pacing rate, congestion window, and quantum to achieve high throughput and low latency. However, many studies have reported performance issues in BBR operation, such as excessive packet loss in shallow buffers, the unfairness among different RTT flows, the unfairness with loss-based algorithms, and so on. Google is developing a new version of BBR, BBRv2, to resolve these performance issues. In this study, we evaluate and compare two versions of BBR on a Mininet emulator and a physical testbed, focusing on whether the BBRv2 alpha can alleviate the performance issues of BBRv1 and whether other novel issues will arise in BBRv2. The experiment results show that BBRv2 improves the unfairness and aggressiveness in small buffer less than 1 BDP. Moreover, multiple BBRv2 flows not only show better fairness in bandwidth sharing, but also reduce the amount of packet retransmissions. However, we observed that the challenging issues such as RTT unfairness, coexistence with loss-based algorithms, and synchronization between BBRv2 flows still exist. This study explores BBRv2's current behavior in various network scenarios and compares the performance of BBRv2 with the BBRv1 congestion control algorithm. INDEX TERMS TCP congestion control, BBRv1, BBRv2, fairness, retransmission. Ph.D. degrees in electronics engineering from Kyungpook National University, in 2015 and 2019, respectively. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Telecommunication and Network Laboratory, Kyungpook National University. His current research interests include multipath TCP, TCP congestion control algorithms, and UAVs path planning and network constraints.

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 1999

This paper considers the potentially negative impacts of an increasing deployment of non-congestion-controlled best-effort traffic on the Internet. 1 These negative impacts range from extreme unfairness against competing TCP traffic to the potential for congestion collapse. To promote the inclusion of end-to-end congestion control in the design of future protocols using best-effort traffic, we argue that router mechanisms are needed to identify and restrict the bandwidth of selected highbandwidth best-effort flows in times of congestion. The paper discusses several general approaches for identifying those flows suitable for bandwidth regulation. These approaches are to identify a high-bandwidth flow in times of congestion as unresponsive, "not TCP-friendly", or simply using disproportionate bandwidth. A flow that is not "TCP-friendly" is one whose long-term arrival rate exceeds that of any conformant TCP in the same circumstances. An unresponsive flow is one failing to reduce its offered load at a router in response to an increased packet drop rate, and a disproportionate-bandwidth flow is one that uses considerably more bandwidth than other flows in a time of congestion.

TPRC, 2009

This paper discusses the evolution of the congestion controls that govern all Internet traffic. In particular we chronicle and discuss the implications of the fact that the most significant "congestion signals" are increasingly coming from network operators, not the TCP stack. Providers ...

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2003