Data center network transport protocols

The data center network (DCN) is a critical infrastructure for most service providers that store data and make intelligent decisions. Data center networks consist of a large number of compute and storage nodes inter-connected through high bandwidth network switches and links. The DCN is utilized for large-scale distributed storage and computing resulting. This network has very high bandwidth links and very low latency. TCP is the transport protocol of choice for reliable end-to-end communication. The DCN traffic consists of a large number of small latency-sensitive messages as well as bandwidth-hungry large messages. This traffic mix causes traffic hotspots within the DCN, hurting the latency as well as link utilization. TCP’s congestion control a nd fair scheduling are woefully inadequate in this setting and does not facilitate the exploitation of multipath connectivity offere d by newer data center topologies. These characteristics demand the design of a new transport protocol.

We analyze modern transport protocols proposed for DCNs that address TCP inadequacies. We provide theoretical performance guarantees and provide design guidelines for system parameters for performance improvements. In addition, we implement the proposed protocols in a DCN testbed and empirically evaluate their performance for applications of int erest, benchmarking their performance against traditional TCP.