A decentralized adaptive ECN marking algorithm

Fair resource allocation in high-speed networks such as the Internet can be viewed as a constrained convex program. Kelly, Maulloo and Tan (see Journal of the Operational Research Society, vol.49, p.237-52, 1998) have shown that an unconstrained penalty function formulation of this problem can be used to design congestion controllers that are stable. We examine the question of providing feedback from the network such that the congestion controllers derived from the penalty function formulation lead to the solution of the original unconstrained problem. This can be viewed as the decentralized design of early congestion notification (ECN) marking rates at each node in the Internet to ensure global loss-free, socially-optimal operation of a fluid model of the network