Towards coordinated congestion control and load balancing in datacenter networks

Abstract

Today's data centers are facing extreme challenges in providing low latency and high throughput simultaneously for their applications. However, the fair sharing congestion control algorithms, together with the hash-based load balancing mechanisms, seriously impede the satisfaction of such requirements. In this paper, we use threshold-based signaling and marking schemes to seamlessly integrate load balancing with congestion control protocols. Through adaptive per-packet load balancing, we evenly split network traffic across multiple paths. Meanwhile, we adaptively react to ECN in the case of congestion, and prioritize flows according to their latency requirements. Using realistic data center workloads, we show that, compared to the state-of-the-art load balancing and TCP, our approach improves the application throughput and mean flow completion time by 30–50% and 40–80%, respectively.