Congestion Control and Traffic Shaping in High-Bandwidth Applications: Techniques to Manage Network Congestion and Optimize Traffic Flow in Gaming, AR/VR, and Cloud Services

Abstract

As the demand for high-bandwidth applications continues to grow in domains such as gaming, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), and cloud services, network congestion and the inefficiencies it causes have emerged as significant challenges. These applications require a reliable, low-latency, and high-throughput network environment to deliver smooth and responsive user experiences. Network congestion, resulting from traffic overloads, latency spikes, and packet loss, can severely degrade performance, leading to jitter, lag, and service interruptions. In this context, congestion control and traffic shaping techniques can be used in managing network load and optimizing data flow, ensuring the performance requirements of high-bandwidth applications are met. This paper explores various congestion control and traffic shaping methods, focusing on their application to real-time, high-bandwidth scenarios. The paper examines traditional approaches such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-based congestion control, novel algorithmic strategies like Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-Trip Time (BBR) and Google’s Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), and traffic shaping techniques like priority queuing, token bucket algorithms, and software-defined networking (SDN). Additionally, the unique requirements of gaming, AR/VR, and cloud services are analyzed, highlighting how traffic characteristics specific to these applications necessitate adaptable congestion management strategies.

AR/VR, cloud services, congestion control, gaming, latency, traffic shaping, 5G networks