Rethinking congestion control architecture

After more than two decades of evolution, TCP and its end host based modifications can still suffer from severely degraded performance under real-world challenging network conditions. The reason, as we observe, is due to TCP family's fundamental architectural deficiency, which hardwires packet-level events to control responses and ignores emprical performance. Jumping out of TCP lineage's architectural deficiency, we propose Performance-oriented Congestion Control (PCC), a new congestion control architecture in which each sender controls its sending strategy based on empirically observed performance metrics. We show through preliminary experimental results that PCC achieves consistently high performance under various challenging network conditions.