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Optimal anticipative congestion control of flows with time-varying input stream

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/02/2012
<mark>Journal</mark>Performance Evaluation
Issue number2
Volume69
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)86-101
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a new type of congestion control method that we call anticipative congestion control, which exploits probabilistic information available at a network node about congestion at other nodes. Motivated by the Internet flows behaving according to the Transmission Control Protocol, we consider a flow with time-varying input stream. We design a Markov decision process model for flow admission control and characterize the Whittle index in a closed form. This index measures the efficiency of flow data transmission at a router. We prove that such an index policy is optimal and that it further implies optimality of threshold policies. We apply the results to obtain an expression of the index for a single-bottleneck flow under several types of fairness criteria.