Paper Info
Title
Practical DCB for improved data center networks
Abstract
Storage area networking is driving commodity data center switches to support lossless Ethernet (DCB). Unfortunately, to enable DCB for all traffic on arbitrary network topologies, we must address several problems that can arise in lossless networks, e.g., large buffering delays, unfairness, head of line blocking, and deadlock. We propose TCP-Bolt, a TCP variant that not only addresses the first three problems but reduces flow completion times by as much as 70%. We also introduce a simple, practical deadlock-free routing scheme that eliminates deadlock while achieving aggregate network throughput within 15% of ECMP routing. This small compromise in potential routing capacity is well worth the gains in flow completion time. We note that our results on deadlock-free routing are also of independent interest to the storage area networking community. Further, as our hardware testbed illustrates, these gains are achievable today, without hardware changes to switches or NICs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/INFOCOM.2014.6848121
Toronto, ON
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
computer centres,local area networks,routing protocols,switching networks,telecommunication network topology,telecommunication traffic,transport protocols,DCB,ECMP routing,NIC,TCP-bolt,arbitrary network topology traffic,buffering delay,commodity data center switch,data center bridging,deadlock-free routing scheme,improved data center network,line blocking head,lossless Ethernet,storage area networking
Conference
0743-166X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.48
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stephens, B.160.48
Alan L. Cox22635223.67
Singla, A.390.90
John B. Carter41785162.82