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Improving datacenter performance and robustness with multipath TCP

Authors:

Damon Wischik, and

Mark HandleyAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 41, Issue 4

Pages 266 - 277

https://doi.org/10.1145/2043164.2018467

Published: 15 August 2011 Publication History

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Abstract

The latest large-scale data centers offer higher aggregate bandwidth and robustness by creating multiple paths in the core of the net- work. To utilize this bandwidth requires different flows take different paths, which poses a challenge. In short, a single-path transport seems ill-suited to such networks.

We propose using Multipath TCP as a replacement for TCP in such data centers, as it can effectively and seamlessly use available bandwidth, giving improved throughput and better fairness on many topologies. We investigate what causes these benefits, teasing apart the contribution of each of the mechanisms used by MPTCP.

Using MPTCP lets us rethink data center networks, with a different mindset as to the relationship between transport protocols, rout- ing and topology. MPTCP enables topologies that single path TCP cannot utilize. As a proof-of-concept, we present a dual-homed variant of the FatTree topology. With MPTCP, this outperforms FatTree for a wide range of workloads, but costs the same.

In existing data centers, MPTCP is readily deployable leveraging widely deployed technologies such as ECMP. We have run MPTCP on Amazon EC2 and found that it outperforms TCP by a factor of three when there is path diversity. But the biggest benefits will come when data centers are designed for multipath transports.

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Index Terms

Improving datacenter performance and robustness with multipath TCP
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 41, Issue 4

SIGCOMM '11

August 2011

480 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/2043164

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGCOMM '11: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference
August 2011
502 pages
ISBN:9781450307970
DOI:10.1145/2018436
General Chairs:
Srinivasan Keshav
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Jörg Liebeherr
University of Toronto, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
John Byers
Boston University, USA
,
Jeffrey Mogul
HP Labs, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 August 2011

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 41, Issue 4

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Cited By

View all

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https://doi.org/10.3390/fi16020037
Han XHan BLi JSong C(2024)Multi-agent DRL-based Multipath Scheduling for Video Streaming with QUICACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/364913920:7(1-23)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649139
Liu SGao YChen ZYe JXu HLiang FYan WTian ZSun QGuo ZXu Y(2024)Halflife: An Adaptive Flowlet-based Load Balancer with Fading Timeout in Data Center NetworksProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3650062(66-81)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627703.3650062
Ma HWang MLv HLiu JDi XQi H(2024) A SDN improvement scheme for multi‐path QUIC transmission in satellite networks Computational Intelligence10.1111/coin.1265040:3Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1111/coin.12650
Liu ZZhao YFan ZYang TLi XZhang RYang KJiang ZZhong ZHuang YLiu CHu JXie GCui B(2024)BurstBalancer: Do Less, Better Balance for Large-Scale Data Center TrafficIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2023.329545435:6(932-949)Online publication date: Jun-2024
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Han JXue KLi JXing YYu RWei DXue G(2024)FMPTCP: Achieving High Bandwidth Utilization and Low Latency in Data Center NetworksIEEE Transactions on Communications10.1109/TCOMM.2023.332367072:1(317-333)Online publication date: Jan-2024
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Diao XGu HWei WJiang GLi B(2024)Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Dynamic Flowlet Switching for DCNIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2024.338213212:2(580-593)Online publication date: Apr-2024
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