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Mitigating incast-TCP congestion in data centers with SDN

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Abstract

In data center networks (DCNs), the presence of long-lived TCP flows tends to bloat the switch buffers. As a consequence, short-lived TCP-incast traffic suffers repeated losses that often lead to loss recovery via timeout. Because the minimum retransmission timeout (minRTO) in most TCP implementations is fixed to around 200 ms, interactive applications that often generate short-lived incast traffic tend to suffer unnecessarily long delays waiting for the timeout to elapse. The best and most direct solution to such problem would be to customize the minRTO to match DCNs delays; however, this is not always possible; in particular in public data centers where multiple tenants, with various versions of TCP, co-exist. In this paper, we propose to achieve the same result by using techniques and technologies that are already available in most commodity switches and data centers and that do not interfere with the tenant’s virtual machines or TCP protocol. In this approach, we rely on the programmable nature of SDN switches and design a SDN-based incast congestion control (SICC) framework, that uses a SDN network application in the controller and a shim-layer in the host hypervisor, to mitigate incast congestion. We demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed scheme via real deployment in a small-scale testbed as well as ns2 simulation experiments in networks of various sizes and settings.

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Notes

  1. We define the traffic inertia of a flow as the worst case amount of traffic that the flow can inject in the network before congestion can be detected. This is typically the maximum amount of traffic that could be lost before the loss is detected and recovery invoked.

  2. Typically, the throughput of internal networking stack is 50–100 Gb/s. This is fast enough to handle tens of concurrent VMs sharing a single or several physical links. Hence, the window update function added to the vswitch would not hog the CPU nor affect the achievable throughput.

  3. The hardware switch was not used because its OF-DPA implementation does not follow OF1.5 specifications [22] which allows for matching on TCP flags. The support for OF1.5 is introduced into OvS starting from version 2.3.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part under Grants: HKPFS PF12-16707, FSGRF13EG14, REC14EG03, and FSGRF14EG24.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Brahim Bensaou & Amuda James Abu

Authors
  1. Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem
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  2. Brahim Bensaou
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  3. Amuda James Abu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem.

Additional information

The source code, simulation, and experiments is available at https://ahmedcs.github.io/SICC/

This paper is an extended version of [4].

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Abdelmoniem, A.M., Bensaou, B. & Abu, A. Mitigating incast-TCP congestion in data centers with SDN. Ann. Telecommun. 73, 263–277 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-017-0608-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-017-0608-1

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