Joint Congestion Control and Routing Optimization: An Efficient Second-Order Distributed Approach

Distributed joint congestion control and routing optimization has received a significant amount of attention recently. To date, however, most of the existing schemes follow a key idea called the back-pressure algorithm. Despite having many salient features, the first-order subgradient nature of the back-pressure based schemes results in slow convergence and poor delay performance. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we make a first attempt at developing a second-order joint congestion control and routing optimization framework that offers utility-optimality, queue-stability, fast convergence, and low delay. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold: i) we propose a new second-order joint congestion control and routing framework based on a primal-dual interior-point approach; ii) we establish utility-optimality and queue-stability of the proposed second-order method; and iii) we show how to implement the proposed second-order method in a distributed fashion.