Buffer Occupancy-Based Transport to Reduce Flow Completion Time of Short Flows in Data Center Networks

Abstract

Today’s data centers host a variety of different applications that impose specific requirements for their flows. Applications that generate short flows are usually latency sensitive; they require their flows to be completed as fast as possible. Short flows suffer to quickly increase their sending rate due to the existing long flows occupying most of the available capacity. This problem is caused due to the slow convergence of the current data center transport protocols. In this paper, we present a buffer occupancy-based transport protocol (BOTCP) to reduce flow completion time of short flows. BOTCP consists of two parts: (i) A novel buffer occupancy-based congestion signal, and (ii) a congestion control scheme that uses the congestion signal to reduce flow completion time of short flows. The proposed buffer occupancy-based congestion signal gives a precise measure of congestion. The congestion control scheme makes a differentiated treatment of short and long flows to reduce flow completion time of short flows. The results show that BOTCP significantly improves flow completion time of short flows over the existing transport protocols in data center networks.