How good are deterministic fluid models of Internet congestion control?

Congestion control algorithms used in the Internet are difficult to analyze or simulate on a large scale, i.e., when there are large numbers of nodes, links and sources in a network. The reasons for this include the complexity of the actual implementation of the algorithm and the randomness introduced in the packet arrival and service processes due to many factors such as arrivals and departures of sources and uncontrollable short flows in the network. To make the simulation tractable, often deterministic fluid model approximations of these algorithms are used. These approximations are in the form of either deterministic delay differential equations, or more generally, deterministic functional differential equations. We justify the use of deterministic models for proportionally-fair congestion controllers under a limiting regime where the number of sources in a network is large. We verify our results through simulations of window-based implementations of proportionally fair controllers and TCP.