F-DCTCP: Fair Congestion Control for SDN-Based Data Center Networks

Abstract

Network congestion control and management has long been a major issue in providing low-latency, high throughput and high link-utilisation. In particular, Data Center Network (DCN) environments, often dominated by partition-aggregate workloads, suffer performance collapse due to TCP Incast caused by inadequate congestion control parameters. This paper proposes a step in solving this problem. In particular, we describe a novel framework to overcome and control congestion in DCNs based on Software Defined Networking (SDN). We propose a native SDN-based congestion control mechanism, termed Fair Data Center TCP (F-DCTCP). As we shall see, the experimental results show that F-DCTCP outperforms all previous proposals by providing the best combined overall performance in terms of throughout, fairness and flow completion times, making it highly attractive for next generation networks.