Comment by teleforce
3 years ago
Those who want more fundamental background on the matter can check this excellent seminal paper by Van Jacobson and Michael Karels [1].
In one of the Computerphile's podcasts on the history of Internet congestion, it's claimed as the most influential paper about the Internet and apparently it has more than 9000 citations as of today [2].
Some trivia, based on this research work Van, together with Steve McCane also created the BPF, Berkeley Packet Filter while he's in Berkeley Uni. This is later adopted by the Linux community as eBPF, and the rest is history [3].
[1]Congestion Avoidance and Control:
https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf
[2]Internet Congestion Collapse - Computerphile:
[3]Berkeley Packet Filter:
First URL has an extra `&l` on it, that 404s. Thanks for the links!
You just have to be very careful with the algorithms in that paper, they had some serious problems (apart from their basic inability to deal with faster links). I like this old but fairly damning analysis from an early Linux TCP developer:
https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/tux/net/ip-routing/README.rto