Dr Ahmed M. A. Sayed has had a paper published at IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
Title: Alleviating Congestion via Switch Design for Fair Buffer Allocation in Datacenters
Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10412648
Authors: Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem (QMUL), Brahim Bensaou (HKUST)
Abstract: In data-centers, the composite origin and bursty nature of traffic, the small bandwidth-delay product and the tiny switch buffers lead to unusual congestion patterns that are not handled well by traditional end-to-end congestion control mechanisms such as TCP. Existing works address the problem by modifying TCP to adapt it to the idiosyncrasies of data-centers. While this is feasible in private environments, it remains almost impossible to achieve practically in public multi-tenant clouds where a multitude of operating systems and thus congestion control protocols coexist. In this work, we design a simple switch-based active queue management scheme to deal with such congestion issues adequately. Our approach requires no modification to TCP which enables easy and seamless deployment in public data-centers via switch software/firmware updates. We present a simple analysis to show its stability and effectiveness, then discuss three different real implementations in software and hardware switches on the NetFPGA platform. Numerical results from NS-2 simulation and experimental results from a small testbed cluster demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving high overall throughput, good fairness, smaller flow completion times (FCT) for short-lived flows, and reduction in the tail of the FCT distribution by as much as two orders of magnitude.