IncastGuard: An Efficient TCP-Incast Mitigation Mechanism for Cloud Networks
Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Brahim Bensaou, Victor Barsoum · 2018
TCP's internet-centric design is oblivious to the composite nature of the data center traffic, and in the presence of small switch buffers and other long-lived flows (elephants), short-lived (mice) flows often experience “Incast” congestion events that significantly affect their flow completion time (FCT). In this paper, we implement a switch- assisted Incast congestion mitigation system that takes into consideration the existence of other elastic traffic in data center networks (DCNs). The so-called IncastGuard system does not require any changes to the TCP protocol at the sender nor at the receiver and is shown to be effective in mitigating the effects of incast congestion via a prototype implementation in NetFPGA and experiments in a small-scale cluster testbed.