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Making Congestion Control Algorithms Insensitive to Underlying Propagation Delays

Authors Cyrus Illick , Michael Roger , Vishal Misra , Dan Rubenstein

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OASIcs.NINeS.2026.27.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Networks → Transport protocols
Keywords
  • Congestion Control
  • Propagation Delay

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Abstract

Underlying propagation delays, which significantly impact flow Round-Trip-Times (RTTs), fundamentally shape how congestion control algorithms (CCAs) allocate bandwidth among competing flows. Traditionally, lower RTTs were desirable, as a flow rate would decrease as RTT increased under conventional CCAs such as Reno and Cubic. More recently, algorithms like BBR reversed this behavior, favoring flows with larger RTTs. In modern heterogeneous networks, where competing flows may employ different CCAs and serve diverse application workloads, notions of fairness become ambiguous and RTT’s role further complexifies addressing an already very challenging problem. We offer a simple but initially counter-intuitive remedy to address how all CCAs can remove this inherent sensitivity to propagation delay: have all flows "emulate" the same underlying propagation delay. Unsurprisingly, this idea is often met with a lot of resistance, since it is in many ways counter to many fundamental tenets of networking and congestion control. In this paper, we try to make the case that while the idea is not a silver bullet on its own, it can greatly simplify design and predictability across existing and future congestion control protocols going forward.

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Cyrus Illick, Michael Roger, Vishal Misra, and Dan Rubenstein. Making Congestion Control Algorithms Insensitive to Underlying Propagation Delays. In 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 139, pp. 27:1-27:26, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.27

Author Details

Cyrus Illick
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Michael Roger
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Vishal Misra
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Dan Rubenstein
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Acknowledgements

We want to thank anonymous reviewers and our shepherd Keith Winstein for valuable feedback that helped improve our paper.

Supplementary Materials

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