Improvement of a TCP incast avoidance method using a fine-grained kernel timer
Shigeyuki Osada, Shogo Wakai, Yukinobu Fukushima, Tokumi Yokohira · 2017
When a standard TCP implementation using the minimum retransmission timeout (RTOmin) of 200 ms is used in distributed file systems in data centers, a well-known throughput degradation called TCP Incast occurs, because 200 ms is too large as an RTOmin in data centers. In order to avoid TCP Incast, a TCP implementation using a much smaller RTOmin attained by a fine-grained kernel timer is proposed. However, throughput still decreases in the implementation when the number of servers in distributed file systems is large. In this paper, we propose an improvement method introducing a new TCP option which enables a client to request servers to retransmit packets in a better timing. Numerical examples obtained by extensive simulation runs show the effectiveness of the improved method.