A positive systems model of TCP-like congestion control: Asymptotic results

We study communication networks that employ drop-tail queueing and Additive-Increase Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) congestion control algorithms. It is shown that the theory of nonnegative matrices may be employed to model such networks. In particular, important network properties, such as: 1) fairness; 2) rate of convergence; and 3) throughput, can be characterized by certain nonnegative matrices. We demonstrate that these results can be used to develop tools for analyzing the behavior of AIMD communication networks. The accuracy of the models is demonstrated by several NS studies.