This article explains how TCP congestion control can save the Internet .
At this year's SIGCOMM conference, congestion control still occupied an hour on the agenda, even though the first paper on TCP congestion control was published 35 years ago.
There are many theories as to why the TCP/IP protocol was more successful than its contemporaries, but these theories are not easy to verify. The success of the Internet Protocol is likely due to many factors. The article believes that congestion control is one of the key factors that enable the Internet to develop from medium to global scale .
In David Clark's paper "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocol," a clear design goal is: "The architecture of the Internet must allow for the distributed management of its resources ." This goal has many different meanings, but Jacobson and Karels first described it in TCP The implementation of congestion control in the Internet is a good example, reflecting their emphasis on this principle.
One of the reasons why the article attributes the success of the Internet to congestion control algorithms is that the path to failure of the Internet was clearly visible in 1986. Jacobson described some early congestion collapse events that caused throughput to drop threefold.
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