UMCC: Uncoupling Multipath Congestion Control through Shared Bottleneck Detection in Path-Aware Networks

There has been a lot of effort in improving coupled congestion control in multipath scenarios by locating shared bottlenecks. However, without transparency and control in the network, these approaches come with high complexity potentially impacting performance in uncongested conditions. At the same time, Path-Aware Networking provides new opportunities to applications and protocols to identify shared bottlenecks more effectively. In this work, we propose UMCC, an uncoupled multipath congestion control algorithm based on SCION that identifies and locates shared bottlenecks. We demonstrate the fairness of UMCC by comparing it with MPTCP at a shared bottleneck. Our results show that UMCC can precisely locate the exact bottleneck up to 70% of the time and increases throughput by 35% by avoiding shared bottlenecks.