Queue length feedback-based solution of TCP Incast in data center networks

Abstract

The Internet offers a large number of applications and services that we use on a daily basis. These widelyused applications are hosted on large-scale, high-performance computing systems called data centers. The performance ofTCP is inefficient in many-to-one communication, which is a common traffic pattern in data center networks. This manyto-one communication causes significant packet losses followed by timeouts, which consequently results in throughputcollapse in data center networks; this problem is known as TCP Incast. In this paper, we present a queue length feedbackbased solution to mitigate TCP Incast. The scheme has two parts: i) a novel queue length-based congestion parameter,which accurately measures congestion along the path from source to destination, and ii) a congestion control schemethat effectively uses the new congestion parameter to prevent throughput collapse due to Incast traffic patterns. Resultsare compared with TCP and DCTCP, the two most common transport protocols deployed in data center networks. Theresults show that the proposed scheme minimizes packet drops and achieves high utilization and burst tolerance.