A wavelet-based approach to detect shared congestion

Per-flow congestion control helps endpoints fairly and efficiently share network resources. Better utilization of network resources can be achieved, however, if congestion management algorithms can determine when two different flows share a congested link. Such knowledge can be used to implement cooperative congestion control or improve the overlay topology of a P2P system. Previous techniques to detect shared congestion either assume a common source or destination node, drop-tail queueing, or a single point of congestion. We propose in this paper a novel technique, applicable to any pair of paths on the Internet, without such limitations. Our technique employs a signal processing method, wavelet denoising, to separate queueing delay caused by network congestion from various other delay variations. Our wavelet-based technique is evaluated through both simulations and Internet experiments. We show that, when detecting shared congestion of paths with a common endpoint, our technique provides faster convergence and higher accuracy while using fewer packets than previous techniques, and that it also accurately determines when there is no shared congestion. Furthermore, we show that our technique is robust and accurate for paths without a common endpoint or synchronized clocks; more specifically, it can tolerate a synchronization offset of up to one second between two packet flows.