Pasi Sarolahti, Mark Allman, Sally Floyd. Determining an Appropriate Sending Rate Over an Underutilized Network Path. Computer Networks Special Issue on Protocols for Fast, Long-Distance Networks, 51(7), May 2007.
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Abstract:

Determining an appropriate sending rate when beginning data transmission into a network with unknown characteristics is a fundamental issue in best-effort networks. Traditionally, the slow-start algorithm has been used to probe the network path for an appropriate sending rate. This paper provides an initial exploration of the efficacy of an alternate scheme called Quick-Start, which is designed to allow transport protocols to explicitly request permission from the routers along a network path to send at a higher rate than allowed by slow-start. Routers may approve, reject or reduce a sender's requested rate. Quick-Start is not a general purpose congestion control mechanism, but rather an anti-congestion control scheme; Quick-Start does not detect or respond to congestion, but instead, when successful, gets permission to send at a high sending rate on an underutilized path. Before deploying Quick-Start there are many questions that need to be answered. However, before tackling all the thorny engineering questions we need to understand whether Quick-Start provides enough benefit to even bother. Therefore, our goal in this paper is to start the process of determining the efficacy of Quick-Start, while also highlighting some of the issues that will need to be addressed to realize a working Quick-Start system.

BibTeX:

@article{SAF07,
    author       =        "Pasi Sarolahti and Mark Allman and Sally Floyd",
    title        =        "{Determining an Appropriate Sending Rate Over an Underutilized Network Path}",
    journal      =        "Computer Networks Special Issue on Protocols for Fast, Long-Distance Networks",
    year         =        2007,
    volume       =        51,
    number       =        7,
    month        =        may,
}