End-to-end congestion control for infiniband

• Published in: IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428) Vol. 2; pp. 1123 - 1133 vol.2
• Main Authors: Santos, J. R., Turner, Y., Janakiraman, G.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2003
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Communication system traffic control; Control systems; Delay; Laboratories; Milling machines; Packet switching; Switches; Telecommunication traffic; Throughput
• ISBN: 9780780377523; 0780377524
• ISSN: 0743-166X; 2641-9874
• DOI: 10.1109/INFCOM.2003.1208949

Infiniband system area networks (SANs) which use link-level flow control experience congestion spreading, where one bottleneck link causes traffic to block throughout the network. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end congestion control scheme that avoids congestion spreading, delivers high throughput, and prevents flow starvation. It couples a simple switch-based ECN packet marking mechanism appropriate for typical SAN switches with small input buffers, together with a source response mechanism that uses rate control combined with a window limit. The classic fairness convergence requirement for source response functions assumes network feedback is synchronous. We relax the classic requirement by exploiting the asynchronous behavior of packet marking. Our experimental results demonstrate that compared to conventional approaches, our proposed marking mechanism improves fairness. Moreover, rate increase functions possible under the relaxed requirement reclaim available bandwidth aggressively and improve throughput in both static and dynamic traffic scenarios.