Efficient cross-layer routing and congestion control architectures for distributed systems
Debessay Fesehaye Kassa · 2013
Major distributed systems such as the Internet, datacenter and hybrid P2P networks share a common known challenge of finding an optimal path to transfer content from a source to a destination and the optimal rate at which content is transmitted. In general networks such as the Internet, per user, there is usually one possible content source/destination such as a web server. There can be multiple possible paths to/from the destination/source (server). In datacenter networks which usually have a tree structure and in hybrid Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, there can be multiple possible servers at which content can be stored and from which content can be re-trieved. Multiple possible servers (sources/destinations) translates into multiple possible paths to/from a content destination/source. Finding an optimal path to/from a destination/source requires efficient conges-tion control and routing schemes. The transmission control protocol (TCP) is the major congestion control protocol in the Internet. TCP and its variants have the drawback of not accurately knowing rate share of flows at bottleneck links. Some protocols proposed to address these drawbacks are not fair to short flows, which are the majority of the Internet traffic. Other protocols result in high queue length and packet drops which translate into a high