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Thakur Akhil Kumar Singh – Dual Degree CSE

Thakur Akhil Kumar Singh received his MS Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). His research work was supervised by Dr. Shatrunjay Rawat. Here’s a summary of  his research work on Utility Based Framework For Reactive And Proactive Congestion Control In SDN: 

Transmission Control Protocol is one of the most widely deployed transport layer protocol around the world. Since TCP is designed for reliable packet transfer, whenever the packet transfer is deemed unsuccessful, TCP takes various steps to resolve it such as re-transmitting the packet, changing the packet sending rate, etc. Congestion in the network is one such reason for unsuccessful packet transfer. The subsequent packet retransmission reduces the goodput in the network. There have been many variations

of TCP for appropriate congestion control. These variations manage the sending rate of the users based upon the feedback they get from the network. In like manner, there are congestion control methods that leverage the facilities of the Software Defined Network(SDN) framework and manage congestion from the controller. The global image of the network in the controller enables the network administrators to deploy rules to manage the occurrences of congestion. 

In this work, we aim to couple both of these approaches. We make use of the reactive approach of the TCP congestion control at the user’s TCP stack. This helps us to manage congestion as it is detected at the user. To proactively reduce the possibility of the occurrence of congestion, we use a SDN controller to detect a congestion event even before it happens. We provide a utility based framework for this joint proactive and reactive mechanisms for congestion control. We propose a system optimization function based upon [15] and show that our user’s and network controller’s congestion control methods optimize the system utility. We simulate our model and show that our model significantly improves the system utility when compared with other congestion control methods.