Congestion avoidance and control

The work

TitleCongestion avoidance and control
AuthorsVan Jacobson; Michael J. Karels
Typeconference paper
Year1988
Citekeyjacobson1988congestion

Where it appeared

Published inSymposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages314--329

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/52324.52356
OpenAlexW4231918747

Access

Landing pagehttps://doi.org/10.1145/52324.52356
Free full texthttps://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/52324.52356

Abstract

In October of '86, the Internet had the first of what became a series of 'congestion collapses'. During this period, the data throughput from LBL to UC Berkeley (sites separated by 400 yards and three IMP hops) dropped from 32 Kbps to 40 bps. Mike Karels1 and I were fascinated by this sudden factor-of-thousand drop in bandwidth and embarked on an investigation of why things had gotten so bad. We wondered, in particular, if the 4.3BSD (Berkeley UNIX) TCP was mis-behaving or if it could be tuned to work better under abysmal network conditions. The answer to both of these questions was "yes".

Copy held

KindPDF, 220.0 kB
Retrieved2026-08-09
Heldlocal, for personal reference
Where it came fromhttps://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf

Where this came from

How it got herethe agent went looking · found via openalex
First seen2026-08-05
Recordreviewed by a person
Approved2026-08-09

Cite it as

@inproceedings{jacobson1988congestion,
  title = {Congestion avoidance and control},
  author = {Van Jacobson and Michael J. Karels},
  year = {1988},
  booktitle = {Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols},
  pages = {314--329},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi = {10.1145/52324.52356},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/52324.52356},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/jacobson1988congestion/ and will keep doing so.