Towards provably performant congestion control
Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, Devdeep Ray, Ruben Martins, Srinivasan Seshan
Abstract
We seek to ease the design of congestion control algorithms (CCAs) that provably perform well under diverse network scenarios including, cellular links, policers, token bucket filters, operating system jitter, etc. Guaranteeing performance under such conditions is hard as it requires considering combinatorial possibilities of CCA and network interactions. We build a framework that allows us to reason about CCAs. It describes (1) the necessary actions that any performant CCA must take, and (2) a provably sufficient amount of information for CCAs to consider when deciding their sending rate. Combining this framework with techniques in formal methods, we synthesize CCAs that provably perform across a diverse set of network conditions. Our methodology also led us to discover and prove fundamental impossibility results.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext d5a236a9-3524-4374-ad55-ebfcabb36669Cited by top-tier papers5
- ACE: Sending Burstiness Control for High-Quality Real-time CommunicationXiangjie Huang, Jiayang Xu, Haiping Wang, Hebin Yu et al.SIGCOMM 2025 · 8 citations
- Syntra: Synthesizing Cross-Layer Controllers for Low-Latency Video StreamingJia Pan, Anup Agarwal, Isil Dillig, Venkat ArunNSDI 2026 · 1 citation
- FRCC: Towards Provably Fair and Robust Congestion ControlAnup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, Srinivasan SeshanNSDI 2026
- Heuristic Analysis from Source Code via Symbolic-Guided OptimizationPantea Karimi, Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla, Ryan Beckett, Santiago Segarra et al.NSDI 2026
- Lightweight Internet Bandwidth Allocation and Isolation with Fractional Fair SharesMarc Wyss, Yih-Chun Hu, Vincent Lenders, Roland Meier et al.NDSS 2026
Builds on6
- ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless NetworksPrateesh Goyal, Anup Agarwal, Ravi Netravali, Mohammad Alizadeh et al.NSDI 2020 · 101 citations
- PCC Proteus: Scavenger Transport And BeyondTong Meng, Neta Rozen Schiff, Philip Brighten Godfrey, Michael SchapiraSIGCOMM 2020 · 79 citations
- Starvation in end-to-end congestion controlVenkat Arun, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari BalakrishnanSIGCOMM 2022 · 44 citations
- Toward formally verifying congestion control behaviorVenkat Arun, Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, Ahmed Saeed, Mohammad Alizadeh et al.SIGCOMM 2021 · 31 citations
- Formal Methods for Network Performance AnalysisMina Tahmasbi Arashloo, Ryan Beckett, Rachit AgarwalNSDI 2023 · 27 citations
Related papers
- César: Cellular Resource Scheduling-Aware Congestion ControlJuhun Shin, Goodsol Lee, Jeongyeup Paek, Saewoong BahkINFOCOM 2025 · 2 citations
- Towards the Fairness of Traffic PolicerDanfeng Shan, Peng Zhang, Wanchun Jiang, Hao Li et al.INFOCOM 2021 · 11 citations
- Congestion Control Safety via Comparative StaticsPratiksha Thaker, Matei Zaharia, Tatsunori HashimotoINFOCOM 2023 · 1 citation
- Multi-objective congestion controlYiqing Ma, Han Tian, Xudong Liao, Junxue Zhang et al.EuroSys 2022 · 52 citations
- Reinforcement Learning-based Congestion Control: A Systematic Evaluation of Fairness, Efficiency and ResponsivenessLuca Giacomoni, George ParisisINFOCOM 2024 · 15 citations
