Hop-By-Hop: Advancing Cooperative Congestion Control for Cyber-Physical Systems

Networked cyber-physical systems are driven by control loops that commonly depend on tight communication timing guarantees, requiring both complex and inflexible scheduling mechanisms to provide the necessary amount of determinism. We previously presented the fundamental idea of Cooperative Congestion Control (CoCC), which enables elastic control applications to share a common network cooperatively. By balancing the resource demands of control applications, it achieves fairness w.r.t. to the quality of control and efficiently avoids congestion and thus harmful delays and losses without the need for complex scheduling mechanisms. We propose lightweight and effective solutions that enable CoCC to deal with multiple bottlenecks and double its convergence speed. Our evaluation results show that high utilization, low delay, fairness, and fast convergence can be achieved by CoCC even in complex multi-bottleneck scenarios with a high number of flows.