COCOON: An Alternative Approach to End-Point Congestion Management

Overview

This paper proposes an alternate endpoint congestion management scheme, called COordinated COngestion cONtrol (COCOON). The basic idea is to identify and group connections that may traverse the same backbone link, to enable them to share congestion information, and to coordinate among them all the congestion avoidance/control activities. The size of a COCOON group can be dynamically adjusted so as to magnify the benefits of end-host congestion management. COCOON also allows a new connection to commerce with a congestion window that is large enough to catch up with other connections while not inducing congestion. Finally, COCOON takes into account non-responsive UDP connections and "Bundles" them into a virtual connection that is subject to TCP-like congestion control.