Explicit multipath congestion control for data center networks

Abstract

The vast majority of application traffic in modern data center networks (DCNs) can be classified into two categories: throughput-sensitive large flows and latency-sensitive small flows. These two types of flows have the conflicting requirements on link buffer occupancy. Existing data transfer proposals either do not fully utilize the path diversity of DCNs to improve the throughput of large flows, or cannot achieve a controllable link buffer occupancy to meet the low latency requirement of small flows. Aiming to balance throughput with latency, we develop the eXplicit MultiPath (XMP) congestion control scheme for DCNs. XMP comprises two components: the BOS algorithm brings link queue buffers consumed by large flows under control, while the TraSh algorithm is responsible for shifting traffic from more congested paths to less congested ones, thus achieving high throughput. We implemented XMP and evaluated its performance on traffic shifting, fairness, goodput, buffer occupancy and link utilization by conducting comprehensive experiments and simulations. The results show that XMP outperforms existing schemes and achieves a reasonable tradeoff between throughput and latency.