Congestion control in high-speed lossless data center networks: A survey

Abstract

In data centers, packet losses cause high retransmission delays, which is harmful to many real-time workloads. To prevent packet losses, the lossless fabrics have been deployed in many production data centers. However, when network congestion happens, the lossless fabric also causes many problems like saturation tree and unfairness, which seriously degrade the performance of data center applications. Therefore, how to control the congestion in high-speed lossless data center networks is a significant problem.In this paper, we first introduce link layer flow control schemes to provide lossless fabrics. Then we survey congestion control schemes in high-speed lossless data center networks. In particular, we classify existing congestion control schemes into two categories: reactive and proactive. Finally, we present the challenges and opportunities for future research in this area.