Scaling Switch-driven Flow Control with Aquarius
Wenxue Li, Chaoliang Zeng, Jinbin Hu, Kai Chen · 2023
As datacenter networks support more diverse applications and faster link speeds, effective end-to-end congestion control becomes increasingly challenging due to the inherent feedback delay. To address this issue, switch-driven per-hop flow control (FC) has gained popularity due to its natural flow isolation, timely control loop, and ability to handle transient congestion. However, the ideal FC requires impractical hardware resources, and the state-of-the-art approximation approach still demands a large number of queues that exceeds common switch capabilities, limiting scalability in practice.