Kick-Ass is a methodology for enabling explicit-rate congestion control mechanisms in the Internet. Kick-Ass does so through the use of IP packet fragmentation to enable communication between routers and endpoints.

Our measurements show that Kick-Ass improves performance up to an order of magnitude over TCP and effectively avoids many of its pitfalls. Additionally, Kick-Ass does not require a full deployment to be effective: our study shows endpoints communicating across a single Kick-Ass router at the edge see an improvement of 1.2 to 4 times.

Faculty:

• Aleksandar Kuzmanovic

Graduate Students:

• Marcel Flores

Undergraduate Students:

• Alexander Wenzel

Kick-Ass: Enabling Router-Assisted Congestion Control on the Internet (To Appear at IEEE ICNP 2016)

Kick-Ass (and RCP) have been implemented in NS-3. The patch (for NS-3.18.1), as well as instructions can be found here [readme].

Kick-Ass has been implemented in Linux (Kernel 3.12.3). The various components can be found below:

• The Router - Implemented as a Linux queuing discipline, available as a loadable module. The source, as well as scripts to perform the basic setup can be found here [readme].
• The Endpoint - Implemented as a patch for the kernel. The patch must be applied and a custom kernel built and loaded. Source and instructions are available here [readme].

Special thanks to

• Andrew Kahn
• Yifei Yang
• Jordan Geltner
• Rachel Stonehirsch
• Dane Stier
• Kyle Hale

for their help in writing and improving the Linux implementation.

Logo by erica dreisbach.

For comments or questions, please contact
marcel-flores @u.northwestern.edu