Communications of the ACM
Researchers Discover Major Roadblock in Alleviating Network Congestion
Congestion control is a fundamental problem in networking that researchers have been trying to tackle since the 1980s.
Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT/iStockphoto
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers found congestion control algorithms designed to ensure fair network use by multiple users fail to prevent certain users from taking up all the bandwidth.
These algorithms attempt to minimize delay caused by data queued in the network, but MIT's Mohammad Alizadeh said bandwidth starvation remains unavoidable using current methods.
The researchers fed a mathematical model of congestion control behavior to a computer, and tasked it to choose a congestion control algorithm that could avoid starvation; this proved impossible.
The researchers' analysis suggests a different class of algorithms could prevent starvation, as could designing congestion control algorithms to allow for larger variations in delay.
From MIT News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2022 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
No entries found