Reducing traffic burstiness for MPTCP in data center networks

Abstract

Modern industrial and data center networks adopt multipath TCP (MPTCP) to achieve low communication latency. To make full use of multiple paths, MPTCP divides one TCP connection into multiple subflows. Due to the connection-level ACK blocking, however, MPTCP suffers from the traffic burstiness, which leads to large queueing delay, frequent packet drops, and even TCP timeout. To mitigate the traffic burstiness caused by ACK blocking, we propose MPTCP-RB (Multipath TCP with Reduced Burstiness), which interleaves consecutive packets across multiple subflows, instead of assigning consecutive packets to individual subflows. MPTCP-RB is implemented as a loadable Linux kernel module, working on any traditional MPTCP-based schemes without any other modifications on existing network stacks. The testbed and NS2 experiments show that, MPTCP-RB reduces the average flow completion time by up to 91% compared with the state-of-the-art MPTCP-based schemes.