Prioritising Interactive Flows in Data Center Networks With Central Control
This work solves network performance issues in data centers, such as low latency and fairness for interactive flows, by enhancing central control mechanisms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing systems like Fastpass.
The thesis tackles the scalability limitations of Fastpass's central arbiter by redesigning its timeslot allocator to support up to 1024 nodes and 7.1 Terabits of traffic, and addresses congestion control in software-defined networks by proposing a framework that uses ECN bits to improve interactive flow completion times, showing a 30x improvement over TCP Cubic and 1.7x over RED.
Data centers are on the rise and scientists are re-thinking and re-designing networks for data centers. The concept of central control which was not effective in the Internet era is now gaining popularity and is used in many data centers due to lower scale of operation (compared to Internet), structured topologies and as the entire network resources is under a single entity's control. With new opportunities, data center networks also pose new problems. Data centers require: high utilization, low median, tail latencies and fairness. In the traditional systems, the bulk traffic generally stalls the interactive flows thereby affecting their flow completion times adversely. In this thesis, we deal with two problems relating to central controller assisted prioritization of interactive flow in data center networks. Fastpass is a centralized "zero-queue" data center network. But the central arbiter of Fastpass doesn't scale well for more than 256 nodes (or 8 cores). In our test runs, it supports only about 1.5 Terabits's of network traffic. In this work, we re-design their timeslot allocator of their central arbiter so that it scales linearly till 12 cores and supports about 1024 nodes and 7.1 Terabits's of network traffic. In the second part of the thesis, we deal with the problem of congestion control in a software defined network. We propose a framework, where the controller with its global view of the network actively participates in the congestion control decisions of the end TCP hosts, by setting the ECN bits of IPV4 packets appropriately. Our framework can be deployed very easily without any change to the end node TCPs or the SDN switches. We also show 30x improvement over TCP cubic and 1.7x improvement over RED in flow completion times of interactive traffic for one implementation of this framework.