RFC 6356: Coupled Congestion Control for Multipath Transport Protocols
In plain English — editorial summary, not part of the RFC
Often endpoints are connected by multiple paths, but communications are usually restricted to a single path per connection. Resource usage within the network would be more efficient were it possible for these multiple paths to be used concurrently. Multipath TCP is a proposal to achieve multipath transport in TCP. New congestion control algorithms are needed for multipath transport protocols such as Multipath TCP, as single path algorithms have a series of issues in the multipath context. One of the prominent problems is that running existing algorithms such as standard TCP independently on each path would give the multipath flow more than its fair share at a bottleneck link traversed by more than one of its subflows. Further, it is desirable that a source with multiple paths available will transfer more traffic using the least congested of the paths, achieving a property called "resource pooling" where a bundle of links effectively behaves like one shared link with bigger capacity. This would increase the overall efficiency of the network and also its robustness to failure. This document presents a congestion control algorithm that couples the congestion control algorithms running on different subflows by linking their increase functions, and dynamically controls the overall aggressiveness of the multipath flow. The result is a practical algorithm that is fair to TCP at bottlenecks while moving traffic away from congested links. This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
Document record
- Document ID
- RFC6356
- Published
- October 2011
- Authors
- C. Raiciu; M. Handley; D. Wischik
- Status
- EXPERIMENTAL
- Stream
- IETF
- Area
- tsv
- Pages
- 12
- Also known as
- —
Topics
Related documents
Ranked automatically by shared keywords, IETF area and stream — not by editorial selection.
- RFC 8041Use Cases and Operational Experience with Multipath TCPCurrent
January 2017
- RFC 8684TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple AddressesCurrent
March 2020
- RFC 6633Deprecation of ICMP Source Quench MessagesCurrent
May 2012
- RFC 7560Problem Statement and Requirements for Increased Accuracy in Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) FeedbackCurrent
August 2015
- RFC 8084Network Transport Circuit BreakersCurrent
March 2017
- RFC 8257Data Center TCP (DCTCP): TCP Congestion Control for Data CentersCurrent
October 2017
- RFC 3517A Conservative Selective Acknowledgment (SACK)-based Loss Recovery Algorithm for TCPObsoleted
April 2003
- RFC 9406HyStart++: Modified Slow Start for TCPCurrent
May 2023
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The document record above — title, authors, date, status, stream, area, relationships, DOI and errata — is imported verbatim from the public RFC Editor index. The “in plain English” section is editorial: written by The metasystema editorial team, not part of the RFC. Where the two differ, the RFC text governs.
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