Virtualized congestion control

Bryce Cronkite-Ratcliff, Aran Bergman, Shay Vargaftik, Madhusudhan Ravi, Nick McKeown, Ittai Abraham, Isaac Keslassy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

78 Scopus citations

Abstract

New congestion control algorithms are rapidly improving datacenters by reducing latency, overcoming incast, increasing throughput and improving fairness. Ideally, the operating system in every server and virtual machine is updated to support new congestion control algorithms. However, legacy applications often cannot be upgraded to a new operating system version, which means the advances are off-limits to them. Worse, as we show, legacy applications can be squeezed out, which in the worst case prevents the entire network from adopting new algorithms. Our goal is to make it easy to deploy new and improved congestion control algorithms into multitenant datacenters, without having to worry about TCP-friendliness with non-participating virtual machines. This paper presents a solution we call virtualized congestion control. The datacenter owner may introduce a new congestion control algorithm in the hypervisors. Internally, the hypervisors translate between the new congestion control algorithm and the old legacy congestion control, allowing legacy applications to enjoy the benefits of the new algorithm. We have implemented proof-of-concept systems for virtualized congestion control in the Linux kernel and in VMware's ESXi hypervisor, achieving improved fairness, performance, and control over guest bandwidth allocations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication
Pages230-243
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450341936
DOIs
StatePublished - 22 Aug 2016
Event2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016 - Florianopolis, Brazil
Duration: 22 Aug 201626 Aug 2016

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Conference

Conference2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityFlorianopolis
Period22/08/1626/08/16

Keywords

  • Algorithmic virtualization
  • DCTCP
  • Datacenters
  • ECN
  • Hypervisors
  • TCP
  • Virtualized congestion control

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Communication
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Signal Processing

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