[Nexus 4 General] richteralan:
Update 1/13/2013:

ROW scheduling Algorithm

The ROW scheduling algorithm will be used in mobile devices as default block layer IO scheduling algorithm. ROW stands for "READ Over WRITE" which is the main requests dispatch policy of this algorithm.

The ROW IO scheduler was developed with the mobile devices needs in mind. In mobile devices we favor user experience upon everything else, thus we want to give READ IO requests as much priority as possible. In mobile devices we won’t have AS much parallel threads as on desktops. Usually it’s a single thread or at most 2 simultaneous working threads for read & write. Favoring READ requests over WRITEs decreases the READ latency greatly.

The main idea of the ROW scheduling policy is: If there are READ requests in pipe - dispatch them but don't starve the WRITE requests too much.

TCP congestion avoidance algorithm

TCP Tahoe and Reno

To avoid congestion collapse, TCP uses a multi-faceted congestion control strategy. For each connection, TCP maintains a congestion window, limiting the total number of unacknowledged packets that may be in transit end-to-end. This is somewhat analogous to TCP's sliding window used for flow control. TCP uses a mechanism called slow start to increase the congestion window after a connection is initialized and after a timeout. It starts with a window of two times the maximum segment size (MSS).

Although the initial rate is low, the rate of increase is very rapid: for every packet acknowledged, the congestion window increases by 1 MSS so that the congestion window effectively doubles for every round trip time (RTT). When the congestion window exceeds a threshold ssthresh the algorithm enters a new state, called congestion avoidance.

In some implementations (e.g., Linux), the initial ssthresh is large, and so the first slow start usually ends after a loss. However, ssthresh is updated at the end of each slow start, and will often affect subsequent slow starts triggered by timeouts.

Congestion avoidance: As long as non-duplicate ACKs are received, the congestion window is additively increased by one MSS every round trip time. When a packet is lost, the likelihood of duplicate ACKs being received is very high (it's possible though unlikely that the stream just underwent extreme packet reordering, which would also prompt duplicate ACKs). The behavior of Tahoe and Reno differ in how they detect and react to packet loss:

Tahoe: Triple duplicate ACKS are treated the same as a timeout. Tahoe will perform "fast retransmit", set the slow start threshold to half the current congestion window, reduce congestion window to 1 MSS, and reset to slow-start state.

Reno: If three duplicate ACKs are received (i.e., four ACKs acknowledging the same packet, which are not piggybacked on data, and do not change the receiver's advertised window), Reno will halve the congestion window (instead of setting it to 1 MSS like Tahoe), set the slow start threshold equal to the congestion window, perform a fast retransmit, and enter a phase called Fast Recovery. If an ACK times out, slow start is used as it is with Tahoe.

Fast Recovery. (Reno Only) In this state, TCP retransmits the missing packet that was signaled by three duplicate ACKs, and waits for an acknowledgment of the entire transmit window before returning to congestion avoidance. If there is no acknowledgment, TCP Reno experiences a timeout and enters the slow-start state.

Both algorithms reduce congestion window to 1 MSS on a timeout event.

TCP Vegas

is a TCP congestion avoidance algorithm that emphasizes packet delay, rather than packet loss, as a signal to help determine the rate at which to send packets.

TCP Vegas detects congestion at an incipient stage based on increasing Round-Trip Time (RTT) values of the packets in the connection unlike other flavors like Reno, NewReno, etc., which detect congestion only after it has actually happened via packet drops. The algorithm depends heavily on accurate calculation of the Base RTT value. If it is too small then throughput of the connection will be less than the bandwidth available while if the value is too large then it will overrun the connection. A lot of research is going on regarding the fairness provided by the linear increase/decrease mechanism for congestion control in Vegas. One interesting caveat is when Vegas is inter-operated with other versions like Reno. In this case, performance of Vegas degrades because Vegas reduces its sending rate before Reno as it detects congestion early and hence gives greater bandwidth to co-existing TCP Reno flows.

TCP Vegas is one of a series of efforts at TCP tuning that adapt congestion control and system behaviors to new challenges faced by increases in available bandwidth in Internet components on networks like Internet2.

TCP New Reno

TCP New Reno, defined by RFC 3782, improves retransmission during the fast recovery phase of TCP Reno. During fast recovery, for every duplicate ACK that is returned to TCP New Reno, a new unsent packet from the end of the congestion window is sent, to keep the transmit window full. For every ACK that makes partial progress in the sequence space, the sender assumes that the ACK points to a new hole, and the next packet beyond the ACKed sequence number is sent.

Because the timeout timer is reset whenever there is progress in the transmit buffer, this allows New Reno to fill large holes, or multiple holes, in the sequence space - much like TCP SACK. Because New Reno can send new packets at the end of the congestion window during fast recovery, high throughput is maintained during the hole-filling process, even when there are multiple holes, of multiple packets each. When TCP enters fast recovery it records the highest outstanding unacknowledged packet sequence number. When this sequence number is acknowledged, TCP returns to the congestion avoidance state.

A problem occurs with New Reno when there are no packet losses but instead, packets are reordered by more than 3 packet sequence numbers. When this happens, New Reno mistakenly enters fast recovery, but when the reordered packet is delivered, ACK sequence-number progress occurs and from there until the end of fast recovery, every bit of sequence-number progress produces a duplicate and needless retransmission that is immediately ACKed.

New Reno performs as well as SACK at low packet error rates, and substantially outperforms Reno at high error rates.

TCP Westwood

is a sender-side-only modification to TCP New Reno that is intended to better handle large bandwidth-delay product paths (large pipes), with potential packet loss due to transmission or other errors (leaky pipes), and with dynamic load (dynamic pipes).

TCP Westwood relies on mining the ACK stream for information to help it better set the congestion control parameters: Slow Start Threshold (ssthresh), and Congestion Window (cwin). In TCP Westwood, an "Eligible Rate" is estimated and used by the sender to update ssthresh and cwin upon loss indication, or during its "Agile Probing" phase, a proposed modification to the well-known Slow Start phase. In addition, a scheme called Persistent Non Congestion Detection (PNCD) has been devised to detect persistent lack of congestion and induce an Agile Probing phase to expeditiously utilize large dynamic bandwidth.

The resultant performance gains in efficiency, without undue sacrifice of fairness, friendliness, and stability have been reported in numerous papers that can be found on The TCP WESTWOOD Home Page. Significant efficiency gains can be obtained for large leaky dynamic pipes, while maintaining fairness. Under a more appropriate criterion for friendliness, i.e. "opportunistic friendliness", TCP Westwood is shown to have good, and controllable, friendliness.

TCP Westwood plus is an evolution of TCP Westwood, in fact it was soon discovered that the Westwood bandwidth estimation algorithm did not work well in the presence of reverse traffic due to ack compression. The TCP Westwood+ version is implemented in the Linux kernel.

Credit:

Tatyana Brokhman,

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.msm/2911

Wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_avoidance_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_Westwood