RPO: Receiver-driven Transport Protocol Using Opportunistic Transmission in Data Center

Abstract

Modern datacenter applications bring fundamental challenges to transport protocols as they simultaneously require low latency and high throughput. Recent receiver-driven trans-port protocols transmit only one data packet once receiving each grant or credit packet from the receiver to achieve ultra-low queueing delay and zero packet loss. However, the round-trip time variation and the highly dynamic background traffic significantly deteriorate the performance of receiver-driven transport protocols, resulting in under-utilized bandwidth. This paper designs a simple yet effective solution called RPO that retains the advantages of receiver-driven transmission while efficiently utilizing the available bandwidth. Specifically, RPO rationally uses low-priority opportunistic packets to ensure high network utilization without increasing the queueing delay of high-priority normal packets. In addition, since RPO only uses Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) marking function and priority queues, RPO is ready to deploy on switches. We implement RPO in Linux hosts with DPDK. Our small-scale testbed experiments and large-scale simulations show that RPO significantly improves the network utilization by up to 35% under high workload over the state-of-the-art receiver-driven transmission schemes, without introducing additional queueing delay.