No Signal to Rule Them All: A Systematic Analysis of In-Network Congestion Signals

In this paper, we address the following question: what in-network signals should a network provide to congestion control algorithms? To answer this guiding question, we use prior work to automatically generate congestion control algorithms optimized for a given performance objective and set of in-network congestion signals. We then make observations about the relative value of these congestion signals across a range of performance objectives. Our analysis yields a surprising central finding: for the average case, sophisticated In-Network Telemetry (INT) offers minimal performance benefits over traditional end-to-end (E2E) signals, with performance typically within 3%. We also find no single "best" INT signal, but rather a clear trade-off that manifests in many scenarios: link-based signals often excel at controlling delay, while queue-based signals are better for maximizing throughput. To make these findings concrete, we validate them by examining the extent to which in-network signals improve the performance of the BBR congestion control algorithm.