Network congestion avoidance through Speculative Reservation

Abstract

Congestion caused by hot-spot traffic can significantly degrade the performance of a computer network. In this study, we present the Speculative Reservation Protocol (SRP), a new network congestion control mechanism that relieves the effect of hot-spot traffic in high bandwidth, low latency, lossless computer networks. Compared to existing congestion control approaches like Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), which react to network congestion through packet marking and rate throttling, SRP takes a proactive approach of congestion avoidance. Using a light-weight endpoint reservation scheme and speculative packet transmission, SRP avoids hot-spot congestion while incurring minimal overhead. Our simulation results show that SRP responds more rapidly to the onset of severe hot-spots than ECN and has a higher network throughput on bursty network traffic. SRP also performs comparably to networks without congestion control on benign traffic patterns by reducing the latency and throughput overhead commonly associated with reservation protocols.