| Abstract: | In this work we first describe an asynchronous‐feedback model which corresponds to the diverse roundtrip times (RTTs) of competing flows within the same communication channel. We show that even when the feedback of the receivers/network is asynchronous, the duration of a congestion epoch represents ‘common knowledge’ for the competing flows. Based on this property, we propose a diverse linear increase scheme in proportion to the RTT of each flow and we adjust periodically the windows of the competing flows accordingly, in order to enhance fairness of asynchronous‐feedback environments. We name this scheme τ‐AIMD and show that fairness of flows in asynchronous systems is improved since the increase‐rate diversity of long and short RTT flows is largely canceled. We use the max–min notion of fairness to show that τ‐AIMD can constitute the foundation for other window‐based, end‐to‐end algorithms that target a good balance between efficiency and fairness. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
