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Improving datacenter performance and robustness with multipath TCP

Published: 15 August 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The latest large-scale data centers offer higher aggregate bandwidth and robustness by creating multiple paths in the core of the net- work. To utilize this bandwidth requires different flows take different paths, which poses a challenge. In short, a single-path transport seems ill-suited to such networks.
We propose using Multipath TCP as a replacement for TCP in such data centers, as it can effectively and seamlessly use available bandwidth, giving improved throughput and better fairness on many topologies. We investigate what causes these benefits, teasing apart the contribution of each of the mechanisms used by MPTCP.
Using MPTCP lets us rethink data center networks, with a different mindset as to the relationship between transport protocols, rout- ing and topology. MPTCP enables topologies that single path TCP cannot utilize. As a proof-of-concept, we present a dual-homed variant of the FatTree topology. With MPTCP, this outperforms FatTree for a wide range of workloads, but costs the same.
In existing data centers, MPTCP is readily deployable leveraging widely deployed technologies such as ECMP. We have run MPTCP on Amazon EC2 and found that it outperforms TCP by a factor of three when there is path diversity. But the biggest benefits will come when data centers are designed for multipath transports.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '11: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference
    August 2011
    502 pages
    ISBN:9781450307970
    DOI:10.1145/2018436
    • cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
      ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 41, Issue 4
      SIGCOMM '11
      August 2011
      480 pages
      ISSN:0146-4833
      DOI:10.1145/2043164
      Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 15 August 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. data center
    2. mptcp

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    SIGCOMM '11: ACM SIGCOMM 2011 Conference
    August 15 - 19, 2011
    Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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    SIGCOMM '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 223 submissions, 14%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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    • (2024)PDASTSGAT: An STSGAT-Based Multipath Data Scheduling AlgorithmAlgorithms10.3390/a1704014517:4(145)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Efficient all-to-all Collective Communication Schedules for Direct-connect TopologiesProceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1145/3625549.3658656(28-41)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
    • (2024)ProactMP: A Proactive Multipath Transport Protocol for Low-Latency DatacentersIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2024.339902821:4(3919-3932)Online publication date: Aug-2024
    • (2024)Enhancing Load Balancing With In-Network Recirculation to Prevent Packet Reordering in Lossless Data CentersIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.340367132:5(4114-4127)Online publication date: Oct-2024
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    • (2023)RLB: Reordering-Robust Load Balancing in Lossless Datacenter NetworksProceedings of the 52nd International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3605573.3605617(576-584)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
    • (2023)Load-optimization in Reconfigurable Data-center Networks: Algorithms and Complexity of Flow RoutingACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems10.1145/35972008:3(1-30)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2023
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