English

Sharing resources is important to ensure that the network efficiently serves its user. In practice, there are many ways to share resources. Some resource sharing schemes consider that some users are more important than others and should obtain more resources. For example, on the roads, police cars and ambulances have priority. In some cities, traffic lanes are reserved for buses to promote public services, ... In computer networks, the same problem arise. Given that resources are limited, the network needs to enable users to efficiently share them. Before designing an efficient resource sharing scheme, one needs to first formalize its objectives. In computer networks, the most popular objective for resource sharing schemes is that they must be `fair`. In a simple situation, for example two hosts using a shared 2 Mbps link, the sharing scheme should allocate the same bandwidth to each user, in this case 1 Mbps. However, in a large networks, simply dividing the available resources by the number of users is not sufficient. Consider the network shown in the figure below where `A1` sends data to `A2`, `B1` to `B2`, ... In this network, how should we divide the bandwidth among the different flows ? A first approach would be to allocate the same bandwidth to each flow. In this case, each flow would obtain 5 Mbps and the link between `R2` and `R3` would not be fully loaded. Another approach would be to allocate 10 Mbps to `A1-A2`, 20 Mbps to `C1-C2` and nothing to `B1-B2`. This is clearly unfair.

English

If `R1` has enough buffers, it will be able to absorb the load without having to discard packets. The packets sent by hosts `A` and `B` will reach their final destination `C`, but will experience a longer delay than when they are transmitting alone. The amount of buffering on the network node is the first parameter that a network operator can tune to control congestion inside his network. Given the decreasing cost of memory, one could be tempted to put as many buffers [#fbufferbloat]_ as possible on the network nodes. Let us consider this case in the network above and assume that `R1` has infinite buffers. Assume now that hosts `A` and `B` try to transmit a file that corresponds to one thousand packets each. Both are using a reliable protocol that relies on go-back-n to recover from transmission errors. The transmission starts and packets start to accumulate in `R1`'s buffers. The presence of these packets in the buffers increases the delay between the transmission of a packet by `A` and the return of the corresponding acknowledgment. Given the increasing delay, host `A` (and `B` as well) will consider that some of the packets that it sent have been lost. These packets will be retransmitted and will enter the buffers of `R1`. The occupancy of the buffers of `R1` will continue to increase and the delays as well. This will cause new retransmissions, ... In the end, only one file will be delivered (very slowly) to the destination, but the link `R1-R2` will transfer much more bytes than the size of the file due to the multiple copies of the same packets. This is known as the `congestion collapse` problem :rfc:`896`. Congestion collapse is the nightmare for network operators. When it happens, the network carries packets without delivering useful data to the end users.

English

Congestion collapse is unfortunately not only an academic experience. Van Jacobson reports in [Jacobson1988]_ one of these events that affected him while he was working at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). LBL was two network nodes away from the University of California in Berkeley. At that time, the link between the two sites had a bandwidth of 32 Kbps, but some hosts were already attached to 10 Mbps LANs. "In October 1986,  the data throughput from LBL to UC Berkeley ... dropped from 32 Kbps to 40 bps. We were fascinated by this sudden factor-of-thousand drop in bandwidth and embarked on an investigation of why things had gotten so bad." This work lead to the development of various congestion control techniques that have allowed the Internet to continue to grow without experiencing widespread congestion collapse events.

English

The node's capacity in bits per second mainly depends on the physical interfaces that it uses and also on the capacity of the internal interconnection (bus, crossbar switch, ...) between the different interfaces inside the node. Many vendors, in particular for low-end devices will use the sum of the bandwidth of the nodes' interfaces as the node capacity in bits per second. Measurements do not always match this maximum theoretical capacity. A well designed network node will usually have a capacity in bits per second larger than the sum of its link capacities. Such nodes will usually reach this maximum capacity when forwarding large packets.

English

Let us consider that host `A` uses a window of three segments. It thus sends three back-to-back segments at `10 Mbps` and then waits for an acknowledgment. Host `A` stops sending segments when its window is full. These segments reach the buffers of router `R1`. The first segment stored in this buffer is sent by router `R1` at a rate of `2 Mbps` to the destination host. Upon reception of this segment, the destination sends an acknowledgment. This acknowledgment allows host `A` to transmit a new segment. This segment is stored in the buffers of router `R1` while it is transmitting the second segment that was sent by host `A`... Thus, after the transmission of the first window of segments, the reliable transport protocol sends one data segment after the reception of each acknowledgment returned by the destination. In practice, the acknowledgments sent by the destination serve as a kind of `clock` that allows the sending host to adapt its transmission rate to the rate at which segments are received by the destination. This `self-clocking` is the first mechanism that allows a window-based reliable transport protocol to adapt to heterogeneous networks [Jacobson1988]_. It depends on the availability of buffers to store the segments that have been sent by the sender but have not yet been transmitted to the destination.

English

If many senders are attached to the left part of the network above, they all send a window full of segments. These segments are stored in the buffers of the router before being transmitted towards their destination. If there are many senders on the left part of the network, the occupancy of the buffers quickly grows. A consequence of the buffer occupancy is that the round-trip-time, measured by the transport protocol, between the sender and the receiver increases. Consider a network where 10,000 bits segments are sent. When the buffer is empty, such a segment requires 1 millisecond to be transmitted on the `10 Mbps` link and 5 milliseconds to be the transmitted on the `2 Mbps` link. Thus, the measured round-trip-time measured is roughly 6 milliseconds if we ignore the propagation delay on the links. If the buffer contains 100 segments, the round-trip-time becomes :math:`1+100 \times 5+ 5` milliseconds as new segments are only transmitted on the `2 Mbps` link once all previous segments have been transmitted. Unfortunately, if the reliable transport protocol uses a retransmission timer and performs `go-back-n` to recover from transmission errors it will retransmit a full window of segments. This increases the occupancy of the buffer and the delay through the buffer... Furthermore, the buffer may store and send on the low bandwidth links several retransmissions of the same segment. This problem is called `congestion collapse`. It occurred several times during the late 1980s on the Internet [Jacobson1988]_.