Elasticity detection
Prateesh Goyal, Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Srinivas Narayana, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan
Abstract
This paper introduces a new metric, "elasticity," which characterizes the nature of cross-traffic competing with a flow. Elasticity captures whether the cross traffic reacts to changes in available bandwidth. We show that it is possible to robustly detect the elasticity of cross traffic at a sender without router support, and that elasticity detection can reduce delays in the Internet by enabling delay-controlling congestion control protocols to be deployed without hurting flow throughput. Our results show that the proposed method achieves more than 85% accuracy under a variety of network conditions, and that congestion control using elasticity detection achieves throughput comparable to Cubic but with delays that are 50--70 ms lower when cross traffic is inelastic.