A Receiver-Driven Transport Protocol With High Link Utilization Using Anti-ECN Marking in Data Center Networks

Abstract

Existing reactive or proactive congestion control protocols are hard to simultaneously achieve ultra-low latency and high link utilization across all workloads ranging from delay-sensitive flows to bandwidth-hungry ones in datacenter networks. We present an Anti-ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) Marking Receiver-driven Transport protocol called AMRT, which achieves both near-zero queueing delay and full link utilization by reasonably increasing sending rate in the case of under-utilization. Specifically, switches mark the ECN bit of data packets once detecting spare bandwidth. When receiving the anti-ECN marked packet, the receiver generates the corresponding marked grant to trigger more data packets. The testbed and simulation experiments show that AMRT effectively reduces the average flow completion time (AFCT) by up to 42% and improves the link utilization by up to 38% over the state-of-the-art receiver-driven transmission schemes.