PACC: A Proactive CNP Generation Scheme for Datacenter Networks

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 32; no. 3; pp. 2586 - 2599
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jiao, Wang, Yuqing, Zhong, Xiaolong, Yu, Mingxuan, Pan, Haoyu, Zhang, Yali, Guan, Zixuan, Che, Biyao, Wan, Zirui, Pan, Tian, Huang, Tao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Completion time; Congestion; congestion control; Data center; Data centers; Performance degradation; Queuing theory; RDMA; Real time; Receivers; Resource management; Servers; switch-driven; Switches; Telecommunications; Throughput
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2024.3361771

The rapid upgrade of link speed and the prosperity of new applications in data center networks (DCNs) lead to a rigorous demand for ultra-low latency and high throughput. To mitigate the overhead of traditional software-based packet processing at end-hosts, RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) has been widely adopted in DCNs. Particularly, congestion control (CC) mechanisms designed for RDMA have attracted much attention to avoid performance deterioration when packets lose. However, through comprehensive analysis, we found that existing RDMA CC schemes have limitations of a sluggish response to congestion and unawareness of tiny microbursts due to the long end-to-end control loop. In this paper, we propose PACC, a proactive and accurate switch-driven RDMA CC algorithm with easy deployability. PACC is driven by PI controller-based computation, threshold-based flow discrimination and weight-based allocation at the switch. It leverages real-time queue length to generate accurate congestion feedback proactively and piggybacks it to the corresponding source without modification to end-hosts. We theoretically analyze the stability, convergence and key parameter settings of PACC. Then, we implement PACC in a testbed consisting of DPDK-based end-hosts and Tofino P4 switches. In our evaluation, PACC achieves better fairness, fast reaction, high throughput, and 6~69% lower FCT (Flow Completion Time) than DCQCN, TIMELY, HPCC and RoCC.