Stability of end-to-end algorithms for joint routing and rate control


Frank Kelly
Thomas Voice
Computer Communication Review 35:2 (2005) 5-12.

Abstract

Dynamic multi-path routing has the potential to improve the reliability and performance of a communication network, but carries a risk. Routing needs to respond quickly to achieve the potential benefits, but not so quickly that the network is destabilized. This paper studies how rapidly routing can respond, without compromising stability.

We present a sufficient condition for the local stability of end-to-end algorithms for joint routing and rate control. The network model considered allows an arbitrary interconnection of sources and resources, and heterogeneous propagation delays. The sufficient condition we present is decentralized: the responsiveness of each route is restricted by the round-trip time of that route alone, and not by the round-trip times of other routes. Our results suggest that stable, scalable load-sharing across paths, based on end-to-end measurements, can be achieved on the same rapid time-scale as rate control, namely the time-scale of round-trip times.


Available as postscript or pdf.
Citations, from Google Scholar.

H. Han, S. Shakkottai, C. V. Hollot, R. Srikant, and D. Towsley. Multi-path TCP: a joint congestion control and routing scheme to exploit path diversity in the internet, IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 14(6), 2006.
Wei-jie Feng, Lei Wang, and Qing-Guo Wang. A family of multi-path congestion control algorithms with global stability and delay robustness, Automatica 50(12), 2014.

Multipath TCP Resources