Equation-based Multicast Congestion control in Data Center networks

Abstract

Multicast communications in data center has gotten great attention with its requirement for social networking services and file distribution, such as OS update towards virtual machines. Multicast communications offer advantage of efficient network resource usage. To the best of authors' knowledge, only feasibility and scalability issues have been treated in published papers for multicast communications in data centers. Data center networks generally operate at high utilization, so congestion control is one of the most important technical issues. This is also the case for multicast communications, but there have not been published any papers related to multicast congestion control in data centers. In this paper, we propose a new multicast congestion control, DCMC (Data Center Multicast Congestion control). DCMC is an end-to-end multicast congestion control and adjusts the sending rate to the estimated throughput of the worst congested receiver. The worst congested receiver is selected by equation-based estimation of receiver's throughput. Our simulation results show that DCMC can achieve TCP friendliness, i.e. fairness, with DCTCP with keeping high link utilization.