Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

On Asymptotic Optimality of Dual Scheduling Algorithm In A Generalized Switch

Generalized switch is a model of a queueing system where parallel servers are interdependent and have time-varying service capabilities. This paper considers the dual scheduling algorithm that uses rate control and queue-length based scheduling to allocate resources for a generalized switch. We consider a saturated system in which each user has infinite amount of data to be served. We prove the asymptotic optimality of the dual scheduling algorithm for such a system, which says that the vector of average service rates of the scheduling algorithm maximizes some aggregate concave utility functions. As the fairness objectives can be achieved by appropriately choosing utility functions, the asymptotic optimality establishes the fairness properties of the dual scheduling algorithm. The dual scheduling algorithm motivates a new architecture for scheduling, in which an additional queue is introduced to interface the user data queue and the time-varying server and to modulate the scheduling process, so as to achieve different performance objectives. Further research would include scheduling with Quality of Service guarantees with the dual scheduler, and its application and implementation in various versions of the generalized switch model

An Optimal Lower Bound for Buffer Management in Multi-Queue Switches

In the online packet buffering problem (also known as the unweighted FIFO variant of buffer management), we focus on a single network packet switching device with several input ports and one output port. This device forwards unit-size, unit-value packets from input ports to the output port. Buffers attached to input ports may accumulate incoming packets for later transmission; if they cannot accommodate all incoming packets, their excess is lost. A packet buffering algorithm has to choose from which buffers to transmit packets in order to minimize the number of lost packets and thus maximize the throughput. We present a tight lower bound of e/(e-1) ~ 1.582 on the competitive ratio of the throughput maximization, which holds even for fractional or randomized algorithms. This improves the previously best known lower bound of 1.4659 and matches the performance of the algorithm Random Schedule. Our result contradicts the claimed performance of the algorithm Random Permutation; we point out a flaw in its original analysis

Buffer Overflow Management with Class Segregation

We consider a new model for buffer management of network switches with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. A stream of packets, each attributed with a value representing its Class of Service (CoS), arrives over time at a network switch and demands a further transmission. The switch is equipped with multiple queues of limited capacities, where each queue stores packets of one value only. The objective is to maximize the total value of the transmitted packets (i.e., the weighted throughput). We analyze a natural greedy algorithm, GREEDY, which sends in each time step a packet with the greatest value. For general packet values $(v_1 < \cdots < v_m)$, we show that GREEDY is $(1+r)$-competitive, where $r = \max_{1\le i \le m-1} \{v_i/v_{i+1}\}$. Furthermore, we show a lower bound of $2 - v_m / \sum_{i=1}^m v_i$ on the competitiveness of any deterministic online algorithm. In the special case of two packet values (1 and $\alpha > 1$), GREEDY is shown to be optimal with a competitive ratio of $(\alpha + 2)/(\alpha + 1)$

Dynamic Server Allocation over Time Varying Channels with Switchover Delay

We consider a dynamic server allocation problem over parallel queues with randomly varying connectivity and server switchover delay between the queues. At each time slot the server decides either to stay with the current queue or switch to another queue based on the current connectivity and the queue length information. Switchover delay occurs in many telecommunications applications and is a new modeling component of this problem that has not been previously addressed. We show that the simultaneous presence of randomly varying connectivity and switchover delay changes the system stability region and the structure of optimal policies. In the first part of the paper, we consider a system of two parallel queues, and develop a novel approach to explicitly characterize the stability region of the system using state-action frequencies which are stationary solutions to a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation. We then develop a frame-based dynamic control (FBDC) policy, based on the state-action frequencies, and show that it is throughput-optimal asymptotically in the frame length. The FBDC policy is applicable to a broad class of network control systems and provides a new framework for developing throughput-optimal network control policies using state-action frequencies. Furthermore, we develop simple Myopic policies that provably achieve more than 90% of the stability region. In the second part of the paper, we extend our results to systems with an arbitrary but finite number of queues.Comment: 38 Pages, 18 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1008.234