A Taxonomy of Congestion Control Techniques for TCP in Wired and Wireless Networks

TCP is developed to provide a reliable end-to-end data delivery over untrustworthy networks. In general, the performance of a specific TCP variant is defined by the congestion control technique. Meanwhile, a typical congestion in a network can cause long queuing delay, high packet loss, high frequent blocked of new connections, etc. Many congestion control techniques have been developed, but their categorization, association, strength, and limitation are not clearly specified. As a result, the developed congestion control technique may not be viable for a particular network environment. In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy to classify 30 different congestion control techniques. Three main criteria of this taxonomy are (1) the device entity that is responsible for ensuring the congestion control technique; (2) the targeted domain of the congestion control technique; and (3) the congestion metric that is used to indicate the congestion status.