Copa+: Analysis and Improvement of the Delay-based Congestion Control Algorithm Copa

Abstract

Copa is a delay-based congestion control algorithm proposed in NSDI recently. It can achieve consistent high performance under various network environments and has already been deployed in Facebook. In this paper, we theoretically analyze Copa and reveal its large queuing delay and poor fairness issue under certain conditions. The root cause is that Copa fails to clear the bottleneck buffer occupancy periodically as expected. Accordingly, Copa may get a wrong base RTT estimation and enter its competitive mode by mistake, leading to large delay and unfairness. To address these issues, we propose Copa+, which enhances Copa with a parameter adaptation mechanism and an optimized competitive mode entrance criterion. Designed based on our theoretical analysis, Copa+ can adaptively clear the bottleneck buffer occupancy for correct estimation of base RTT. Consequently, Copa+ inherits the advantages of Copa but achieves lower queuing delay and better fairness under different environments, as confirmed by the real-world experiments and simulations. Specifically, Copa+ has the highest throughput similar to Copa but 11.9% lower queuing delay over different Internet links among different cloud nodes, and achieves 39.4% lower queuing delay and 8.9% higher throughput compared to Sprout over emulated cellular links.