Enhanced Explicit Congestion Notification (EECN) in TCP with P4 Programming

Abstract

In current TCP/IP networks, TCP mainly relies on packet drops as an indication of congestion. With the emergence of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), TCP can detect the congestion through packets with marked bits instead of dropped packets. ECN thus reduces the unnecessary delay due to packet drops, especially for bandwidth-delay sensitive connections. However, ECN still relies on the receiver for congestion indication, which incurs a round trip time (RTT) before the sender can react to the congestion. In network environments with a high bandwidth-delay product (BDP), this could be problematic. In this paper, we present an enhanced ECN mechanism for the early detection of congestion using P4 programming. In our proposed scheme, the sender does not have to wait for the receiver to indicate congestion because switches in the network can indicate congestion. We evaluate our scheme comparing our proposed solution with standard TCP and TCP with the conventional ECN. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms ECN as the RTT grows.