Ouroboros main repository https://ouroboros.rocks/cgit/ouroboros/atom?h=0.24.0 2026-07-19T09:44:36+00:00 2026-07-19T09:44:36+00:00 Dimitri Staessens dimitri@ouroboros.rocks 2026-07-05T16:58:37+00:00 urn:sha1:d050aea4cd892d71ed7fc78b6c6149a7231db5fc Congestion avoidance is a property of the layer, orthogonal to ARQ and to flow control: FRCP retransmits and lets the peer pace the sender, per flow, end-to-end; the IPCP paces path aggregates. Each signal means one thing: a loss triggers a retransmission, a mark means congestion, the peer window means a slow receiver. Every flow is paced by the same rate law whatever its QoS, so a greedy raw sender shares a bottleneck fairly with a reliable stream. The unit of control is the (destination address, QoS cube) aggregate: all flows toward that destination share one controller and one rate; a start-time fair-queuing pacer divides the rate across them by deadline instead of blocking the send path, and a new flow rides the aggregate's estimates at its current rate, with no probing of its own. Slow start runs once per aggregate. The congestion signal is a multi-bit magnitude: forwarders mark packets with their standing queue depth, MAX-combined across hops, so a packet carries the deepest queue on its path. The receiver feeds back a time-integral mean over a window that adapts to the flow's byte rate, measuring a slow flow with the same fidelity as a fast one. The sender runs AIMD scaled by elapsed wall-clock time, which makes the steady-state allocation RTT-independent. The PCI gains one byte: the path capacity as a quarter-log2 code. Forwarders estimate their egress rate from busy-period drain and MIN-stamp the byte, the receiver returns the window minimum with its feedback, and the sender scales its rate floor and additive slope to the bottleneck (C / 32). A deep cut implies a backlogged bottleneck and a backlogged bottleneck advertises its capacity, so the scaled floor is live exactly when recovery needs it: the probe heals a halving in seconds at any link rate, and the floor bounds the deepest hole to a factor 32 below the bottleneck. Signed-off-by: Dimitri Staessens <dimitri@ouroboros.rocks> Signed-off-by: Sander Vrijders <sander@ouroboros.rocks>