Designing Fast and Friendly TCP to Fit High Speed Data Center Networks
Tao Zhang, Jiawei Huang, Jianxin Wang, Jianer Chen, Yi Feng Pan, Geyong Min · 2018
The dramatic expansion of link capacity in current data center network causes remarkable challenges to the design of new transport layer protocol, that is, how to converge as fast as possible to help data flow effectively utilize the high bandwidth. Meanwhile, the new protocol should be friendly to the traditional TCP because the non-cooperating applications with old TCP versions are widely existing. Therefore, it is important to achieve a trade-off between the aggressiveness and TCP-friendliness in protocol design. In this paper, we first empirically study why the existing typical data center TCP variants naturally fail to guarantee both fast convergence and TCP friendliness. Then, we design FFC, a transport protocol that makes independent decisions and self-adjustment through retrieving the two-dimensional congestion notification from the RTT and ECN. The results of simulation experiments and real implementations show that the fast convergence of FFC leads to the lower flow completion time compared with DX and DCTCP. Meanwhile, when coexisting with the traditional TCP, FFC also presents a moderate competitiveness, while introducing trivial deployment overhead only at the end hosts.