At the end of July, Google Cloud Platform released a new congestion control algorithm called BBR – short for “Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time”. According to their announcement, it has already increased throughput on the YouTube network by an average of 4% and up to 14%!
At the most basic level, it differs from historical approaches to congestion control by focusing on the entire round-trip process data goes through to better evaluate bandwidth vs mainly looking at packet loss as an indication of bandwidth. The key benefits of this approach come from not overreacting to non-congestion related packet loss, as well as reducing issues with “bufferbloat” and queuing delays.
We’re very interested in where this change can lead and what continued advancements will come from it. If you’re a GCP customer, we’d love to hear if you’ve noticed improvements.
Read more on the GCP blog.