Thanks to COVID-19 pushing all of our lives online even more than they used to be, congestion control is an extremely important topic today. With so many different services, websites, and applications sending data across the internet, networks are more busy and crowded than ever before and congestion control algorithms have never been needed so desperately.
What is congestion control?
Congestion control is about managing the rate at which data is sent from one point to another across the internet. The aim of congestion control algorithms is to make sure that every service can send data at the right speed, so that no one service hogs all the bandwidth, while also giving each connection the network space it needs to provide good quality of experience (QoE) for users.
Why is congestion control important for internet media providers?
If you don’t have efficient congestion control, the end user is likely to have poor QoE, which can translate into:
Annoying time lags on video conferencing, online gaming, or live TV
Frustrating delays before a streaming video begins
Poor image quality on online videos
Worst of all, repeated rebuffering in the middle of streaming video
Improving congestion control is one of the best ways to improve internet user experience across the board, but it’s a lot easier said than done.
Effective congestion control is a serious challenge
Congestion control is extremely complex, and computer scientists have been arguing about the best way to achieve it for years. Some of the problems include the fact that the real world internet network is murky and changes rapidly, different connections are competing for bandwidth, and each sender is making unilateral decisions without much, if any, knowledge about other users’ actions.
As a result, every existing congestion control solution has serious drawbacks that result in a lack of fairness to the various connections and poor QoE for end users. That’s why Compira Labs has developed its proprietary congestion control solution based on its own model-free, PCC approach.
Congestion control (fully) explained
To help explain the different factors that go into congestion control, some of the most common congestion control solutions, and the need for something new, our chief scientist Michael Schapira wrote this ebook. It’s extremely comprehensive (ahem, 53 pages and 17 figures, in case you’re wondering), so we’re not joking when we say it’s the ultimate guide.
In the ebook, you’ll learn:
What congestion control is (and is not)
Why congestion control matters for all internet users
The fundamental concepts behind congestion control theories
Why real world congestion control is so difficult to achieve
The most popular congestion control methods (and why they don’t always work)
A new approach to effective congestion control
If you would like the Compira Labs’ team to help you figure out how the TCP congestion-control algorithm that you use on your servers is performing and what may be better alternatives, we’ll be happy to jump on a complementary consulting call, simply click through on the banner below and complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch.
Commentaires