Remy: TCP ex Machina (computer-generated congestion control)

Author's instructions:

Remy is an optimization tool to develop new TCP congestion-control schemes, given prior knowledge about the network it will encounter and an objective to optimize for.

It is described further at the Web site for TCP ex Machina. A research paper on Remy was published at the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 annual conference.

Basic usage:

• Remy requires a C++11 compiler to compile, e.g. gcc 4.6 or contemporary clang++. You will also need the Google protobuf-compiler and the Boost C++ libraries.

• From the version-control repository checkout, run ./autogen.sh, ./configure, and make to build Remy.

• Run ./remy to design a RemyCC (congestion-control algorithm) for the default scenario, with link speed drawn uniformly between 10 and 20 Mbps, minRTT drawn uniformly between 100 and 200 ms, the maximum degree of multiplexing drawn uniformly between 1 and 32, and each sender "on" for an exponentially-distributed amount of time (mean 5 s) and off for durations drawn from the same distribution.

• Use the of= argument to have Remy save its RemyCCs to disk. It will save every step of the iteration.

• Use the if= argument to get Remy to read previous RemyCCs as the starting point for optimization.

• The sender-runner tool will execute saved RemyCCs. The filename should be set with a if= argument. It also accepts link= to set the link speed (in packets per millisecond), rtt= to set the RTT, and nsrc= to set the maximum degree of multiplexing.

If you have any questions, please visit Remy's Web site or e-mail remy at mit dot edu.

-- Keith Winstein

Reproduction Resources:

• All the dna files used for our results are present in dna_files folder

• The configurations used for 2018 runs are present in configurations folder

• Window transformation parameters can be adjusted in src/whiskers.hh

To produce the graphs:

We have updated the tests/run-plot-script.py to produce results in tests/plot-results. A new trained algorithm can be plotted in following way:

• Using make

  • Update REMYCC_NAME in tests/run-plot-script.py
  • Run make -j check (this also runs additional checks)

• Calling the script directly

  • Update REMYCC_NAME in tests/run-plot-script.py
  • Setup srcdir variable using export srcdir=<path to remy>/remy/tests
  • Run ./run-plot-scripts.py

The resultant csv file is generated in tests/plot-results/data. We used this method to generate score for individual rule files and then used separte python script to combine them together. The script can be found in tests/plot-results/data/plot.ipynb