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This theoretical framework provides insights into the inherent topological properties of a network in at least three areas: (1) It identifies the regions of influence of each bottleneck; (2) it reveals the order in which bottlenecks (and flows traversing them) converge to their steady state transmission rates in distributed congestion control algorithms; and (3) it provides key insights into the design of optimized traffic engineering policies. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed theory in TCP congestion-controlled networks for two broad classes of algorithms: Congestion-based algorithms (TCP BBR) and loss-based additive-increase\/multiplicative-decrease algorithms (TCP Cubic and Reno). Among other results, our network experiments show that: (1) Qualitatively, both classes of congestion control algorithms behave as predicted by the bottleneck structure of the network; (2) flows compete for bandwidth only with other flows operating at the same bottleneck level; (3) BBR flows achieve higher performance and fairness than Cubic and Reno flows due to their ability to operate at the right bottleneck level; (4) the bottleneck structure of a network is continuously changing and its levels can be folded due to variations in the flows' round trip times; and (5) against conventional wisdom, low-hitter flows can have a large impact to the overall performance of a network.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3366707","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,18]],"date-time":"2019-12-18T13:21:11Z","timestamp":1576675271000},"page":"1-31","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":16,"title":["On the Bottleneck Structure of Congestion-Controlled Networks"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"3","author":[{"given":"Jordi","family":"Ros-Giralt","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Reservoir Labs, New York City, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Atul","family":"Bohara","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Reservoir Labs, New York City, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Sruthi","family":"Yellamraju","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Reservoir Labs, New York City, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"M. 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