2016/04/26 by Danfeng Shan, Fengyuan Ren, Shan, Danfeng +5
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1604.07621
14 pages, 18 figures
arxiv created 2016/04/26 · openalex publication_date 2016/04/26 · arxiv updated 2016/04/27 · openalex created_date 2016/07/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Micro-burst traffic is not uncommon in data centers. It can cause packet dropping, which results in serious performance degradation (e.g., Incast problem). However, current solutions that attempt to suppress micro-burst traffic are extrinsic and ad hoc, since they lack the comprehensive and essential understanding of micro-burst's root cause and dynamic behavior. On the other hand, traditional studies focus on traffic burstiness in a single flow, while in data centers micro-burst traffic could occur with highly fan-in communication pattern, and its dynamic behavior is still unclear. To this end, in this paper we re-examine the micro-burst traffic in typical data center scenarios. We find that evolution of micro-burst is determined by both TCP's self-clocking mechanism and bottleneck link. Besides, dynamic behaviors of micro-burst under various scenarios can all be described by the slope of queue length increasing. Our observations also implicate that conventional solutions like absorbing and pacing are ineffective to mitigate micro-burst traffic. Instead, senders need to slow down as soon as possible. Inspired by the findings and insights from experimental observations, we propose S-ECN policy, which is an ECN marking policy leveraging the slope of queue length increasing. Transport protocols utilizing S-ECN policy can suppress the sharp queue length increment by over 50%, and reduce the 99th percentile of query completion time by ~20%.