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Paper of Fang-Chun Kuo and Xiaoming Fu accepted for publication in ACM SIGCOMM CCR

The paper "Probe-aided MulTCP: An Aggregate Congestion Control Mechanism" is one of the recent efforts about aggregate congestion control, which could be used for scenarios like edge-to-edge overlay, wireless TCP proxy, QoS provisioning and mass data transport. It is accepted by the ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review and will be published in the issue of January 2008.

Dr. Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at the University of Cambridge, wrote in the public review as follows:
Despite some views on changing things (e.g. “Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion” by Bob Briscoe fairly recently in these very pages), the Internet still runs smoothly because (at least partly) of TCP-friendliness. Actually, some people suggest that it is also possibly that most sites are access link speed limited, and the core networks are over-provisioned, but that is another story.
However, there are certainly links, and indeed end-to-end paths where there is plenty of capacity. These links are still shared, and capacity has to be assigned somehow, but why should it be assigned only in units of a single TCP flowshare's worth?
A goal in the original work on MulTCP was to provide a mechanism for single sources to allocate themselves multiple TCP’s worth of capacity, but remain collectively TCP-friendly. This paper extends that work to improve the fairness of MulTCP by provide a reference flowshare of a single TCP’s worth, and use this to control the window adjustment for the aggregate rate. The authors explain the algorithm and evaluate it using ns-2, and present the results clearly and effectively. There may be niche applications of this approach directly (as they mention, in storage area networks, or in some overlays), and the algorithm is of interest to those working on TCP-friendly flows of other type (e.g. multimedia).
We might talk about beating weapons of TCP-friendliness into flowshares.

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