TCP congestion control for wireless datacenters

Abstract

TCP is a low cost and easy-to-use transport layer protocol widely used in datacenter based applications and web services. Many TCP congestion control algorithms have been proposed to improve the performance of TCP in datacenter networks. However, the emerging wireless technologies in datacenter networks create new problems for TCP congestion control. On the one hand, TCP algorithms must suit the special application patterns (such as incast and Partition/Aggregate) of the datacenters. On the other hand, TCP must perform well within the random packet losses caused by unreliable wireless links. Although there are many datacenter/wireless oriented TCP algorithms for either datacenter or wireless networks, designing a TCP algorithm that can meet both “datacenter” and “wireless” requirements of wireless datacenters still remains a great challenge. In this paper, a novel congestion control algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of TCP over wireless datacenter environments. The proposed approach combines an ACK-based wireless network bandwidth estimate with an ECN-based datacenter TCP congestion control that can perform well in both the datacenter environments and wireless links. The simulated experiments validate the performance of our proposed approach.