Reading on "XCP"

This paper presents eXplicit Control Protocol(XCP) which is aimed to solve the problems facing TCP because of the introduce of high speed optical and long delay satellite links to the Internet. XCP generates the ECN(explicit congestion notification) and brings a new concept to decouple the utilization from fairness. The idea itself is quite straightforward. It adds the congestion header to the packets and the routers are able to write some of fields in the packet's congestion header according to the congestion condition. Similar with "core stateless" paper, the authors also used the fluid model. More, they also used control theory to prove their method's stability.

Dina Katabi is a powerful woman. This is  a first paper i read which was written by her as a first author.

XCP is a nice idea but a kind of common cause it was time to think about using interaction to do congestion control after finishing thinking about solution for congestion control both on user side and router side. But good paper needs more theoretical analysis and experiments to verify the correctness and convince the readers. Obviously, Dina's paper has everything.

What I can take away is mainly about "Rethinking congestion control" part. Like Dina said, "our initial objective is to stay back and rethink the congestion control protocol without caring about the backward compatibility or deployment ."