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DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.8

Contracts: A Unified Lens on Congestion Control Robustness, Fairness, Congestion, and Generality

Authors: Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, and Srinivasan Seshan

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 139, 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)

Abstract

Congestion control algorithms (CCAs) operate in partially observable environments. They cannot directly observe link capacities or competing flows. To share network resources fairly, CCAs (implicitly) communicate fair shares through observable signals. For instance, Reno encodes the fair share as ∝ 1/√{loss rate}. We call such communication mechanisms as contracts. We find that the choice of contract fixes key steady-state performance metrics, including (1) robustness to errors in congestion signals, (2) fairness, (3) amount of congestion (e.g., delay, loss), and (4) generality (e.g., range of supported link rates). This leads to fundamental tradeoffs between these metrics. Further, we show that many contracts lead to starvation (extreme unfairness), and must be avoided. Hence, contracts are a powerful way to analyze tradeoffs and avoid pitfalls in CCA design and analysis. We empirically validate our findings and discuss their implications on CCA design and network measurement.

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Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, and Srinivasan Seshan. Contracts: A Unified Lens on Congestion Control Robustness, Fairness, Congestion, and Generality. In 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 139, pp. 8:1-8:30, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{agarwal_et_al:OASIcs.NINeS.2026.8,
  author =	{Agarwal, Anup and Arun, Venkat and Seshan, Srinivasan},
  title =	{{Contracts: A Unified Lens on Congestion Control Robustness, Fairness, Congestion, and Generality}},
  booktitle =	{1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)},
  pages =	{8:1--8:30},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-414-7},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{139},
  editor =	{Argyraki, Katerina and Panda, Aurojit},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.8},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-255933},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: Transport Protocols, Congestion Control, Fairness}
}

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Contracts: A Unified Lens on Congestion Control Robustness, Fairness, Congestion, and Generality

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