15-441 Project 2 FAQ Document

Checkpoint 1

(1) Is there a good way to check if our congestion control is working properly?

    Plotting the window size, as described in Section 5.2.1 of the handout, is a good way to see how your congestion control is behaving. The plot should look similar to those of typical TCP behavior. You might want to search online for resources showing such graphs, and compare the nature of the curves in these and your plot, paying attention to how they increase and decrease. Essentially, the curve increases exponentially during the slow start phase, and linearly in the congestion avoidance phase.

(2) What topologies should our implementation be able to deal with?

    Your implementation needs to robustly handle different network topologies, without depending on certain restrictions or assumptions. Topologies shown in the handout are examples, and it must be capable of operating properly with other topologies in general. We encourage you to first develop your code with loss-free networks, to make sure it supports basic functionalities. Once you complete this step, proceed with augmenting your implementation to handle lossy networks.