Backpressure Flow Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Backpressure Flow Control (BFC), a new congestion control architecture that improves tail latency and throughput in data center networks by implementing per-hop flow control with bounded state on programmable hardware.

Contribution

The paper proposes and evaluates BFC, a novel per-hop congestion control method with bounded state and constant-time switch operations, implemented on Tofino2 hardware.

Findings

BFC achieves near optimal throughput and tail latency in simulations.

BFC reduces tail latency by 2.3 to 60 times for short flows.

BFC improves average completion time by 1.6 to 5 times for long flows.

Abstract

Effective congestion control for data center networks is becoming increasingly challenging with a growing amount of latency sensitive traffic, much fatter links, and extremely bursty traffic. Widely deployed algorithms, such as DCTCP and DCQCN, are still far from optimal in many plausible scenarios, particularly for tail latency. Many operators compensate by running their networks at low average utilization, dramatically increasing costs. In this paper, we argue that we have reached the practical limits of end-to-end congestion control. Instead, we propose, implement, and evaluate a new congestion control architecture called Backpressure Flow Control (BFC). BFC provides per-hop per-flow flow control, but with bounded state, constant-time switch operations, and careful use of buffers. We demonstrate BFC's feasibility by implementing it on Tofino2, a state-of-the-art P4-based programmable hardware switch. In simulation, we show that BFC achieves near optimal throughput and tail latency behavior even under challenging conditions such as high network load and incast cross traffic. Compared to existing end-to-end schemes, BFC achieves 2.3 - 60 X lower tail latency for short flows and 1.6 - 5 X better average completion time for long flows.