QuickCast: Fast and Efficient Inter-Datacenter Transfers using Forwarding Tree Cohorts

Large inter-datacenter transfers are crucial for cloud service efficiency and are increasingly used by organizations that have dedicated wide area networks between datacenters. A recent work uses multicast forwarding trees to reduce the bandwidth needs and improve completion times of point-to-multipoint transfers. Using a single forwarding tree per transfer, however, leads to poor performance because the slowest receiver dictates the completion time for all receivers. Using multiple forwarding trees per transfer alleviates this concern--the average receiver could finish early; however, if done naively, bandwidth usage would also increase and it is apriori unclear how best to partition receivers, how to construct the multiple trees and how to determine the rate and schedule of flows on these trees. This paper presents QuickCast, a first solution to these problems. Using simulations on real-world network topologies, we see that QuickCast can speed up the average receiver's completion time by as much as $10\times$ while only using $1.04\times$ more bandwidth; further, the completion time for all receivers also improves by as much as $1.6\times$ faster at high loads.Comment: [Extended Version] Accepted for presentation in IEEE INFOCOM 2018, Honolulu, H

Centralized vs distributed communication scheme on switched ethernet for embedded military applications

Current military communication network is a generation old and is no longer effective in meeting the emerging requirements imposed by the future embedded military applications. Therefore, a new interconnection system is needed to overcome these limitations. Two new communication networks based upon Full Duplex Switched Ethernet are presented herein in this aim. The first one uses a distributed communication scheme where equipments can emit their data simultaneously, which clearly improves system’s throughput and flexibility. However, migrating all existing applications into a compliant form could be an expensive step. To avoid this process, the second proposal consists in keeping the current centralized communication scheme. Our objective is to assess and compare the real time guarantees that each proposal can offer. The paper includes the functional description of each proposed communication network and a military avionic application to highlight proposals ability to support the required time constrained communications