tcp_bbr: adapt cwnd based on ack aggregation estimation
Aggregation effects are extremely common with wifi, cellular, and cable modem link technologies, ACK decimation in middleboxes, and LRO and GRO in receiving hosts. The aggregation can happen in either direction, data or ACKs, but in either case the aggregation effect is visible to the sender in the ACK stream. Previously BBR's sending was often limited by cwnd under severe ACK aggregation/decimation because BBR sized the cwnd at 2*BDP. If packets were acked in bursts after long delays (e.g. one ACK acking 5*BDP after 5*RTT), BBR's sending was halted after sending 2*BDP over 2*RTT, leaving the bottleneck idle for potentially long periods. Note that loss-based congestion control does not have this issue because when facing aggregation it continues increasing cwnd after bursts of ACKs, growing cwnd until the buffer is full. To achieve good throughput in the presence of aggregation effects, this algorithm allows the BBR sender to put extra data in flight to keep the bottleneck utilized during silences in the ACK stream that it has evidence to suggest were caused by aggregation. A summary of the algorithm: when a burst of packets are acked by a stretched ACK or a burst of ACKs or both, BBR first estimates the expected amount of data that should have been acked, based on its estimated bandwidth. Then the surplus ("extra_acked") is recorded in a windowed-max filter to estimate the recent level of observed ACK aggregation. Then cwnd is increased by the ACK aggregation estimate. The larger cwnd avoids BBR being cwnd-limited in the face of ACK silences that recent history suggests were caused by aggregation. As a sanity check, the ACK aggregation degree is upper-bounded by the cwnd (at the time of measurement) and a global max of BW * 100ms. The algorithm is further described by the following presentation: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/101/materials/slides-101-iccrg-an-update-on-bbr-work-at-google-00 In our internal testing, we observed a significant increase in BBR throughput (measured using netperf), in a basic wifi setup. - Host1 (sender on ethernet) -> AP -> Host2 (receiver on wifi) - 2.4 GHz -> BBR before: ~73 Mbps; BBR after: ~102 Mbps; CUBIC: ~100 Mbps - 5.0 GHz -> BBR before: ~362 Mbps; BBR after: ~593 Mbps; CUBIC: ~601 Mbps Also, this code is running globally on YouTube TCP connections and produced significant bandwidth increases for YouTube traffic. This is based on Ian Swett's max_ack_height_ algorithm from the QUIC BBR implementation. Signed-off-by: Priyaranjan Jha <priyarjha@google.com> Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com> Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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