Investigations into the robustness of computer-synthesized congestion control

Recent work has shown that computer-synthesized TCP congestion control protocols can outperform the state of the art. However, these protocols are generally too complex to reason about. Human engineers therefore might not trust them enough to deploy them in real networks. This thesis presents two contributions toward the practical deployment of computer-synthesized congestion-control algorithms. First, we describe a simple, human-designed protocol that performs comparably to computer-optimized protocols using only 10 lines of code, suggesting that it may be feasible to optimize for interpretability in addition to performance. Second, we introduce techniques for reasoning about the behavior of black-box protocols via extensive simulation, which reveal regions of potentially undesirable behavior in both computer-optimized protocols and a NewReno-like TCP implementation, highlighting areas to focus further engineering effort.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Thaker, Pratiksha Ranjit

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hari Balakrishnan.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100682

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/100682