Effective TCP Flow Management Based on Hierarchical Feedback Learning in Complex Data Center Network

Abstract

Many studies focusing on improving Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) flow control realize a more effective use of bandwidth in data center networks. They are excellent ways to more effectively use the bandwidth between clients and back-end servers. However, these schemes cannot achieve the total optimization of bandwidth use for data center networks as they do not take into account the path design of TCP flows against a hierarchical complex structure of data center networks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a TCP flow management scheme specified a hierarchical complex data center network for effective bandwidth use. The proposed scheme dynamically controls the paths of TCP flows by reinforcement learning based on a hierarchical feedback model, which obtains an optimal TCP flow establishment policy even if both the network topology and link states are more complicated. In evaluation, the proposed scheme achieved more effective bandwidth use and reduced the probability of TCP incast up to 30% than the conventional TCP flow management schemes: Variant Load Balancing (VLB), Equal Cost Multi Path (ECMP), and Intelligent Forwarding Strategy Based on Reinforcement Learning (IFS-RL) in the complex data center network.