Starvation in End-to-end Congestion Control

To overcome weaknesses in traditional loss-based congestion control algorithms (CCAs), researchers have developed and deployed several delay-bounding CCAs that achieve high utilization without bloating delays (e.g., Vegas, FAST, BBR, PCC, Copa, etc.). When run on a path with a fixed bottleneck rate, these CCAs converge to a small delay range in equilibrium. This paper proves a surprising result: although designed to achieve reasonable inter-flow fairness, current methods to develop delay-bounding CCAs cannot always avoid starvation, an extreme form of unfairness. Starvation may occur when such a CCA runs on paths where non-congestive network delay variations due to real-world factors such as ACK aggregation and end-host scheduling exceed double the delay range that the CCA converges to in equilibrium. We provide experimental evidence for this result for BBR, PCC Vivace, and Copa with a link emulator. We discuss the implications of this result and posit that to guarantee no starvation an efficient delay-bounding CCA should design for a certain amount of non-congestive jitter and ensure that its equilibrium delay oscillations are at least one-half of this jitter.