On the interaction between TCP-like sources and throughput-efficient scheduling policies

We focus on the dynamic interaction in packet networks between regulated Additive-Increase Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) traffic sources and max-scalar scheduling policies (such as the popular Maximum Weight Matching — MWM) at switches. The latter were proved to be optimal in terms of throughput for stationary unregulated traffic sources.We describe the average dynamics of both traffic sources and switch queues through a system of Delay Differential Equations (DDEs), whose properties are thoroughly analyzed. Our study allows to gain important insights both on the system efficiency and on the long-term bandwidth share among connections.Our main finding is that AIMD sources and max-scalar switches coexist well.