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Non-Conserved Flow Control for Erasure Coding-Based Network Communications
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DOI：10.1109/ton.2026.3704596.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Erasure coding has emerged as a powerful technique in network communications, offering significant advantages over retransmission-based reliable communication, particularly in networks with a large bandwidth-delay product. By reducing latency associated with feedback and increasing throughput in multipath environments, erasure coding can enhance overall network performance. Although extensive research has focused on integrating erasure coding into network protocols, a comprehensive and systematic exploration of how erasure coding affects the design of congestion control mechanisms is still lacking. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits of incorporating erasure coding into congestion control design to improve network resource utilization under dynamic network conditions such as fluctuating link bandwidth and user churn. We consider a communication protocol built from the ground up with erasure coding, called the Coding-based Non-conserved Communication Protocol (CNCP), which adopts hop-by-hop congestion control. CNCP distinguishes itself from traditional network protocols by accommodating non-conserved flows: at an intermediate node of a user’s flow, the total incoming flow rate can be strictly higher than the total outgoing flow rate. Erasure coding can help compensate for the packet loss caused by non-conserved flows. To bound the queuing delay caused by packet buffering at intermediate nodes, we design a two-tier queuing architecture with an explicit packet deletion strategy. Our theoretical analysis reveals that non-conserved flows do not undermine fairness and may expedite convergence toward optimal network utilization. Furthermore, we develop a hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism specifically tailored for non-conserved flows in CNCP. Through extensive simulations, we show that combining erasure coding and non-conserved flow control can significantly enhance network communication performance under dynamic network conditions.
Keywords:
Erasure coding
non-conserved flow
hop-by-hop congestion control
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