Modeling TCP Incast Issue in Data Center Networks and an Adaptive Application-Layer Solution

Abstract

In data centers, the transmission control protocol (TCP) incast causes catastrophic goodput degradation to applications with a many-to-one traffic pattern. In this paper, we intend to tame incast at the receiver-side application. Towards this goal, we first develop an analytical model that formulates the incast probability as a function of connection variables and network environment settings. We combine the model with the optimization theory and derive some insights into minimizing the incast probability through tuning connection variables related to applications. Then, enlightened by the analytical results, we propose an adaptive application-layer solution to the TCP incast. The solution equally allocates advertised windows to concurrent connections, and dynamically adapts the number of concurrent connections to the varying conditions. Simulation results show that our solution consistently eludes incast and achieves high goodput in various scenarios including the ones with multiple bottleneck links and background TCP traffic.