Hm - spreading out the ramping-up over time may not be necessary for getting the window up to size while keeping congestion low. One idea that I found intrigui

Hm - spreading out the ramping-up over time may not be necessary for getting the window up to size while keeping congestion low. One idea that I found intriguing is "probing" the appropriate window size by "trying out" a large range of window sizes in a single round-trip time: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jasleen/papers/infocom09.pdf http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jasleen/papers/infocom09.pdf So you can start slowly, but time isn't necessarily the axis along which your start is "slow" or "fast." I am really interested to see whether the above or a similar protocol will be able to spread out "slow"-start over an axis of window sizes that the protocol probes for. Then maybe we will be less concerned with who gets to decide what the initial congestion window is, because you can't ramp up too "fast" when you know what to ramp up to.