Evaluation of TCP Congestion Control for Public High-Performance Wide-Area Networks

2026-03-13

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of accurately predicting flow completion time (FCT) for large-scale data transfers in public high-performance wide-area networks (HP-WANs), where limited control over critical path parameters hinders efficient scheduling of compute and storage resources. The work presents the first systematic evaluation of FCT predictability under mainstream TCP congestion control algorithms—including CUBIC, BBRv1, and BBRv3—in real-world HP-WAN environments, augmented with ingress traffic shaping for optimization. Large-scale experiments conducted on the FABRIC testbed demonstrate that, in challenging scenarios characterized by microburst-induced packet loss, BBRv1 combined with traffic shaping significantly enhances FCT predictability, thereby providing reliable latency guarantees for cross-domain data scheduling.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Practitioners of a growing number of scientific and artificial-intelligence (AI) applications use High-Performance Wide-Area Networks (HP-WANs) for moving massive data sets between remote facilities. Accurate prediction of the flow completion time (FCT) is essential in these data-transfer workflows because compute and storage resources are tightly scheduled and expensive. We assess the viability of three TCP congestion control algorithms (CUBIC, BBRv1, and BBRv3) for massive data transfers over public HP-WANs, where limited control of critical data-path parameters precludes the use of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2), which is known to outperform TCP in private HP-WANs. Extensive experiments on the FABRIC testbed indicate that the configuration control limitations can also hinder TCP, especially through microburst-induced packet losses. Under these challenging conditions, we show that the highest FCT predictability is achieved by combination of BBRv1 with the application of traffic shaping before the HP-WAN entry points.

Problem

• TCP congestion control
• High-Performance Wide-Area Networks
• flow completion time
• packet loss
• predictability

Innovation

• TCP congestion control
• flow completion time predictability
• traffic shaping
• microburst-induced packet loss
• high-performance wide-area networks