Delay-based cloud congestion control

Abstract

As the Internet owes its scalability and stability to TCP, congestion control also plays a key role in the performance, efficiency, and stability of datacenters, as evidenced by the efforts to standardize congestion management (CM) for 10+ Gbps networks. The next step up from datacenters is CM for clouds. New solutions are necessary for clouds because, while the recent CM schemes have been tested on L2 reliable networks, they are limited by design to relatively small single domain datacenters. TCP, on the other hand, while scalable and continously evolving, was not designed for μs-latency lossless networks. To address this problem we first investigate whether path delay could serve as a reliable congestion measure for clouds spanning across multiple datacenters and heterogenous networks. A qualitative open loop analysis of two datacenter networks (10 Gb/s Ethernet and 12x Infiniband) yields positive results. We close the congestion control loop by adapting the delay observer to a re-designed AIMD controller whose base algorithm we extensively analyzed in IEEE 802.1Qau. However, despite the statistical correlation between congestion severity and delay, the low signal/noise ratio (1-2dB), and the congestion notification lag threaten the closed loop stability. Hence we design a combination of two original filters, called Dual-Edge KDS-CUSUM. After preliminary loop tuning in Matlab, simulation results in OMNeT++ bear out the trade-off between stability and dynamic response. The concept is validated on a cluster software implementation.