Real-Time In-Network Microburst Mitigation on Programmable Switch

Yu-Jie Lin,Charles H.-P Wen,Chi-Hsiang Hung

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3139642

Yu-Jie Lin, Charles H.-P Wen + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3139642

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Abstract

Microbursts in the datacenter network (DCN) last for an extremely short time in switches and are difficult to discover from a coarse-grained perspective. Most prior works are dedicated to in-network detection of microbursts and have not yet attempted to mitigate them in real time. Therefore, a realtime microburst mitigator, called RIMM, is proposed in this work and mainly applies <b>orderly detours</b> with <b>flowlet intervals</b> for preventing packet loss and packet retransmission in the network. RIMM mainly consists of three key components: (1) detour launcher, (2) packet sequencer, and (3) post-detour handler, and can entirely work in-network on a programmable switch. Experimental results demonstrate that RIMM is capable of preventing packet loss, allowing the reduction of packet retransmissions, while effectively reducing microbursts, resulting in an enhanced data-center network performance.

Highlights

W ITH the rapid development of network technologies, various services and applications are migrated to the cloud environment
The jitter time of the basic forwarding was improved from 7.89 ms to 2.15 ms by real-time in-network microburst mitigator (RIMM)
POST-DETOUR HANDLER Once a microburst occurs, Detour Launcher and Packet Sequencer activate the packet detouring on the programmable switch in real time and effectively prevents packet loss from the overflow on the queue buffer of an egress port

Summary

INTRODUCTION

W ITH the rapid development of network technologies, various services and applications are migrated to the cloud environment. Two prior works [6] [10] applied the ECN marking with TCP to observe the characteristics of network traffic under different applications. They predict the upcoming queue overflows and, in advance, slow down the senders to prevent possible future congestion. A real-time in-network microburst mitigator named RIMM is proposed and mainly consists of three components: (1) detour launcher, (2) packet sequencer, and (3) post-detour handler. RIMM successfully mitigates microbursts in the network and effectively prevents packet loss as well as packet retransmission without the intervention of the SDN controller or modification on sender’s TCP protocol stack.

RELATED WORKS

TCP FLOWLET

RTT between hosts extended for discussion:

Findings

CONCLUSIONS