Adaptively adjusting ECN marking thresholds for datacenter networks

Abstract

ECN thresholds have limited operational range and very strict scope. Lower thresholds exacerbate the queue underflow while higher thresholds increase the queueing delays. In this paper, an Adaptive ECN (A-ECN) marking scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of ECN. A-ECN can adaptively adjust ECN marking thresholds in different scenarios to achieve good generality. Therefore, network operators can directly deploy A-ECN in various environments regardless of underlying queue types and bandwidth.