FairQ: Fair and Fast Rate Allocation in Data Centers

Abstract

The peculiar congestion patterns in data centers are caused by the bursty and composite nature of traffic, the small bandwidth-delay product, and the tiny switch buffers. It is not practical to modify TCP to adapt to data centers, especially in public clouds where multiple congestion control protocols coexist. In this work, we design a switch-based method to address such congestion issues; our approach does not require any modification to TCP, which enables easy and seamless deployment in public data centers via switch software update. We first present a simple analysis to demonstrate the stability and effectiveness of the scheme, and then we discuss a hardware NetFPGA switch-based prototype. The experimental results from real deployments in a small testbed cluster show the effectiveness of our approach.