TY - JOUR
T1 - RAPID
T2 - Avoiding TCP Incast Throughput Collapse in Public Clouds with Intelligent Packet Discarding
AU - Xu, Yang
AU - Shukla, Shikhar
AU - Guo, Zehua
AU - Liu, Sen
AU - Tam, Adrian S.W.
AU - Xi, Kang
AU - Chao, H. Jonathan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/8
Y1 - 2019/8
N2 - Many applications in public clouds require a high fan-in, many-to-one type of data communication (known as TCP incast) in modern Data Center Networks (DCNs). Such communication could cause severe incast congestion in switches and result in TCP throughput collapse, substantially degrading the application performance. The root cause of throughput collapse is the Retransmission Timeouts (RTO) due to packet losses in congested switches. Tenants in public clouds can opt to use a variety of TCP versions. However, the existing solutions rely on modifications of TCP protocols and specific techniques from switches, and thus these existing solutions are not always feasible for public clouds. In this paper, we are inspired by the emerging virtualization and network softwarization technologies to develop a novel scheme called Retransmission timeout Avoidance by Packet Intelligent Discarding (RAPID) using software switches. RAPID considers the number of packets of each incast flow, buffered in the switch to selectively discard some packets, and ensures that the Fast Retransmission/Fast Recovery rather than RTO is invoked at the sender(s) in response to packet loss. Thus, the long idle period of a timeout and the throughput drop are avoided. We prove that, given a predetermined minimum switch buffer space, dedicated to the incast application, RAPID can prevent RTO in all the incast senders. We also present a low-complexity heuristic version of RAPID named RAPID-ED, which combines the principles of RAPID and early detection and is extremely easy to implement on today's software switches. We evaluate the two proposed schemes in a data center network testbed built on NS-3 simulator. The simulation results confirm the theoretical expectation, and show that the RAPID and RAPID-ED perform very well to prevent RTO of TCP incast flows and hence the throughput collapse. Compared with other incast solutions, RAPID and RAPID-ED do not modify TCP protocols and therefore are more suitable in public clouds.
AB - Many applications in public clouds require a high fan-in, many-to-one type of data communication (known as TCP incast) in modern Data Center Networks (DCNs). Such communication could cause severe incast congestion in switches and result in TCP throughput collapse, substantially degrading the application performance. The root cause of throughput collapse is the Retransmission Timeouts (RTO) due to packet losses in congested switches. Tenants in public clouds can opt to use a variety of TCP versions. However, the existing solutions rely on modifications of TCP protocols and specific techniques from switches, and thus these existing solutions are not always feasible for public clouds. In this paper, we are inspired by the emerging virtualization and network softwarization technologies to develop a novel scheme called Retransmission timeout Avoidance by Packet Intelligent Discarding (RAPID) using software switches. RAPID considers the number of packets of each incast flow, buffered in the switch to selectively discard some packets, and ensures that the Fast Retransmission/Fast Recovery rather than RTO is invoked at the sender(s) in response to packet loss. Thus, the long idle period of a timeout and the throughput drop are avoided. We prove that, given a predetermined minimum switch buffer space, dedicated to the incast application, RAPID can prevent RTO in all the incast senders. We also present a low-complexity heuristic version of RAPID named RAPID-ED, which combines the principles of RAPID and early detection and is extremely easy to implement on today's software switches. We evaluate the two proposed schemes in a data center network testbed built on NS-3 simulator. The simulation results confirm the theoretical expectation, and show that the RAPID and RAPID-ED perform very well to prevent RTO of TCP incast flows and hence the throughput collapse. Compared with other incast solutions, RAPID and RAPID-ED do not modify TCP protocols and therefore are more suitable in public clouds.
KW - TCP incast
KW - TCP timeout
KW - queue management
KW - random early detection
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85069926863
U2 - 10.1109/JSAC.2019.2927072
DO - 10.1109/JSAC.2019.2927072
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85069926863
SN - 0733-8716
VL - 37
SP - 1911
EP - 1923
JO - IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
JF - IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IS - 8
M1 - 8766803
ER -