Finishing the tiny flows quickly for common data centre services

Abstract

Meeting the deadline requirement for the application flow is always a challenge in data centre. Aiming at this problem, many transmission control protocol (TCP) variants are proposed and most of them focus on improving the congestion avoidance phase while rarely considering the slow-start. This paper presents an improved TCP slow-start mechanism, which uses large initial windows (LIW) to help more flows to be finished before their deadlines and does not increase the network congestion meanwhile. The simulation results show that LIW can greatly enhance the meeting deadline ratio of flows involved in web searching and data mining application services which are common in data centres. Moreover, LIW can be easily deployed with rarely modifying the TCP stack.