Networking in the absence of congestion control.

We study a future Internet networking paradigm where instead of congestion control an open loop traffic control is applied. We aim to give theoretical foundations for data transfer controlled only by the access points of the network. The key characteristics of networks without congestion control are stability and efficiency addressed in this paper. We consider the queue length processes of data-flows on directed graphs. The stability is characterized by the ergodicity of these processes and the efficiency of the network is measured by the Price of Anarchy. Under restrictions on the input traffic rates we derive an achievable efficiency limit in a stable network for very general conditions, namely, for any network topology and for any buffer management policy. Moreover, we show that even for cyclic networks, which usually cause severe instability in networks, an upper bound for the loss of efficiency can be given independently of the size of the network under a fair AQM buffer management policy. Furthermore, for monotonic networks we present a reasonable choice for setting access capacities. Our results demonstrate that with a proper setting of access capacities of incoming flows the congestion collapse of the Internet can be avoided even without congestion control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]