The original 1988 Congestion Avoidance and Control paper is still well worth reading: http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.

The original 1988 Congestion Avoidance and Control paper is still well worth reading: http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf The observations about timers and ack-clocking are still as relevant today. That's not to say that 1988-style Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease is perfect as a congestion control scheme. There are lots of issues, ranging from not working well on paths with high bandwidth-delay product, to being overly sensitive to non-congestive packet loss, to causing buffer bloat. But I don't think there's any doubt that the Internet survived growing both in traffic and in hosts by many orders of magnitude, survived all the underlying technologies being replaced multiple times, and survived massive changes in applications, all in part because TCP does a reasonable job of matching offered load to available capacity.