Effect of buffers on stability of Internet congestion controllers

Abstract

Almost all existing fluid models of congestion control assume that the fluid flow at the output of a link is the same as the fluid flow at the input of the link. This means that all links in the path of a flow see the original source rate. In reality, a fluid flow is modified by the queueing processes on its path, so that an intermediate link will generally not see the original source rate. In this paper, we propose a simple model that explicitly takes into account of the effect of buffering on output flows. We study the dual and primal-dual algorithms that use implicit feedback and show that, while they are always asymptotically stable if feedback delay is ignored, they can be unstable in the new model.

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