A Lower Bound on Latency Spikes for Capacity-Seeking Network Traffic

Abstract: Most Internet traffic is carried by capacity-seeking protocols such as TCP and QUIC. Capacity-seeking protocols probe to find the maximum available throughput from sender to receiver, and, once they converge, attempt to keep sending traffic at this maximum rate. Achieving reliable low latency with capacity-seeking end-to-end methods is not yet entirely solved. We contribute a theoretical analysis to this ongoing discussion. In this work, we derive an expression for the minimum size of the spike in latency caused by a sudden drop in network capacity. Our results highlight a quantifiable and fundamental constraint on capacity-seeking network traffic. When end-to-end capacity is suddenly reduced, capacity-seeking traffic inevitably produces a latency spike. A lower bound on this latency spike can be calculated by multiplying the round-trip delay from the network bottleneck to the source of capacity-seeking traffic by the magnitude of the end-to-end capacity reduction. Testbed experiments show that this bound holds for the DCTCP, BBR, and Cubic congestion control algorithms. Our results have implications for the design of low-latency PHY and MAC-layer technologies because we quantify an important transport-layer consequence of unstable traffic rates.