Low Latency Datacenter Networking: A Short Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in low latency datacenter networking, categorizing techniques like queue reduction, retransmission acceleration, flow prioritization, and multi-path exploitation, highlighting challenges and future opportunities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy and critical review of recent research efforts in low latency datacenter networks, guiding future work.

Findings

Techniques for queue length reduction improve latency.

Prioritizing small flows enhances performance.

Multi-path strategies offer latency benefits.

Abstract

Datacenters are the cornerstone of the big data infrastructure supporting numerous online services. The demand for interactivity, which significantly impacts user experience and provider revenue, is translated into stringent timing requirements for flows in datacenter networks. Thus low latency networking is becoming a major concern of both industry and academia. We provide a short survey of recent progress made by the networking community for low latency datacenter networks. We propose a taxonomy to categorize existing work based on four main techniques, reducing queue length, accelerating retransmissions, prioritizing mice flows, and exploiting multi-path. Then we review select papers, highlight the principal ideas, and discuss their pros and cons. We also present our perspectives of the research challenges and opportunities, hoping to aspire more future work in this space.