Design and Implementation of Fair Congestion Control for Data Centers Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a switch-based queue management scheme for data center networks that improves congestion control without modifying TCP, ensuring high throughput, fairness, and low delay in public environments.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel, simple switch-based congestion control method that does not require TCP modifications, facilitating deployment in public data centers.

Findings

Achieves high throughput and fairness in data center traffic

Reduces flow completion times for delay-sensitive flows

Validated through simulations and real-world experiments

Abstract

In data centers, the nature of the composite bursty traffic along with the small bandwidth-delay product and switch buffers lead to several congestion problems that are not handled well by traditional congestion control mechanisms such as TCP. Existing work try to address the problem by modifying TCP to suit the operational nature of data centers. This is practically feasible in private settings, however, in public environments, such modifications are prohibited. Therefore, in this work, we design simple switch-based queue management to deal with such congestion issues adequately. This approach entails no modification to the TCP sender and receiver algorithms which enables easy and seamless deployment in public data centers. We present a theoretical analysis to show the stability and effectiveness of the scheme. We also present, three different real implementations (as a Linux kernel module and as an added feature to OpenvSwitch) and give numerical results from both NS-2 simulation and experiments of real deployment in a small test-bed cluster to show its effectiveness in achieving high throughput overall, a good fairness and short flow completion times for delay-sensitive flows.