Congestion avoidance mechanisms allow a network to operate in the optimal region of low delay and high throughput, thereby, preventing the network from becoming congested. This is different from the traditional congestion control mechanisms that allow the network to recover from the congested state of high delay and low throughput. Both congestion avoidance and congestion control mechanisms are resource management problems in which the system senses its state and feeds this back to its users who adjust their controls.

The key component of any congestion control avoidance scheme is the algorithm (or control function) used by the users to increase or decrease their load (window or rate). We abstractly characterize a wide class of such increase/decrease algorithms and compare them using several different performance metrics. The key metrics are efficiency, fairness, convergence time, and size of oscillations.

It is shown that a simple additive increase and multiplicative decrease algorithm satisfies the sufficient conditions for convergence to an efficient and fair state regardless of the starting state of the network. This is the algorithm finally chosen for implementation in the congestion avoidance scheme recommended for Digital Networking Architecture and OSI Transport Class 4 Networks.

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