Performance evaluation of AQM techniques with heterogeneous traffic

Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques have been proposed to support scenarios with many connections sharing the same bottleneck. The basic idea is that a smart management of the bottleneck queue can avoid the saturation of the link and ensure a smoother use of the available bandwidth. This is generally achieved by exploiting the flux control mechanism of TCP and its behavior in case of packet losses or other explicit notifications. In this paper we consider classic and innovative AQM techniques and analyse their performance under different scenarios through the use of mean field models

Controlling Network Latency in Mixed Hadoop Clusters: Do We Need Active Queue Management?

With the advent of big data, data center applications are processing vast amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data, in parallel on large clusters, across hundreds to thousands of nodes. The highest performance for these batch big data workloads is achieved using expensive network equipment with large buffers, which accommodate bursts in network traffic and allocate bandwidth fairly even when the network is congested. Throughput-sensitive big data applications are, however, often executed in the same data center as latency-sensitive workloads. For both workloads to be supported well, the network must provide both maximum throughput and low latency. Progress has been made in this direction, as modern network switches support Active Queue Management (AQM) and Explicit Congestion Notifications (ECN), both mechanisms to control the level of queue occupancy, reducing the total network latency. This paper is the first study of the effect of Active Queue Management on both throughput and latency, in the context of Hadoop and the MapReduce programming model. We give a quantitative comparison of four different approaches for controlling buffer occupancy and latency: RED and CoDel, both standalone and also combined with ECN and DCTCP network protocol, and identify the AQM configurations that maintain Hadoop execution time gains from larger buffers within 5%, while reducing network packet latency caused by bufferbloat by up to 85%. Finally, we provide recommendations to administrators of Hadoop clusters as to how to improve latency without degrading the throughput of batch big data workloads.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 610456 (Euroserver). The research was also supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain under the contracts TIN2012-34557 and TIN2015-65316-P, Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272), HiPEAC-3 Network of Excellence (ICT- 287759), and the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV-2011-00067) of the Spanish Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Will TCP work in mmWave 5G Cellular Networks?

The vast available spectrum in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands offers the possibility of multi-Gbps data rates for fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. However, mmWave capacity can be highly intermittent due to the vulnerability of mmWave signals to blockages and delays in directional searching. Such highly variable links present unique challenges for adaptive control mechanisms in transport layer protocols and end-to-end applications. This paper considers the fundamental question of whether TCP - the most widely used transport protocol - will work in mmWave cellular systems. The paper provides a comprehensive simulation study of TCP considering various factors such as the congestion control algorithm, including the recently proposed TCP BBR, edge vs. remote servers, handover and multi- connectivity, TCP packet size and 3GPP-stack parameters. We show that the performance of TCP on mmWave links is highly dependent on different combinations of these parameters, and identify the open challenges in this area.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. To be published in the IEEE Communication Magazin

TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding service: what about the results?

Since the proposition of Quality of Service architectures by the IETF, the interaction between TCP and the QoS services has been intensively studied. This paper proposes to look forward to the results obtained in terms of TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (DiffServ/AF) service and to present an overview of the different proposals to solve the problem. It has been demonstrated that the standardized IETF DiffServ conditioners such as the token bucket color marker and the time sliding window color maker were not good TCP traffic descriptors. Starting with this point, several propositions have been made and most of them presents new marking schemes in order to replace or improve the traditional token bucket color marker. The main problem is that TCP congestion control is not designed to work with the AF service. Indeed, both mechanisms are antagonists. TCP has the property to share in a fair manner the bottleneck bandwidth between flows while DiffServ network provides a level of service controllable and predictable. In this paper, we build a classification of all the propositions made during these last years and compare them. As a result, we will see that these conditioning schemes can be separated in three sets of action level and that the conditioning at the network edge level is the most accepted one. We conclude that the problem is still unsolved and that TCP, conditioned or not conditioned, remains inappropriate to the DiffServ/AF service

A study on fairness and latency issues over high speed networks and data center networks

Newly emerging computer networks, such as high speed networks and data center networks, have characteristics of high bandwidth and high burstiness which make it difficult to address issues such as fairness, queuing latency and link utilization. In this study, we first conduct extensive experimental evaluation of the performance of 10Gbps high speed networks. We found inter-protocol unfairness and larger queuing latency are two outstanding issues in high speed networks and data center networks. There have been several proposals to address fairness and latency issues at switch level via queuing schemes. These queuing schemes have been fairly successful in addressing either fairness issue or large latency but not both at the same time. We propose a new queuing scheme called Approximated-Fair and Controlled-Delay (AFCD) queuing scheme that meets following goals for high speed networks: approximated fairness, controlled low queuing delay, high link utilization and simple implementation. The design of AFCD utilizes a novel synergistic approach by forming an alliance between approximated fair queuing and controlled delay queuing. AFCD maintains very small amount of state information in sending rate estimation of flows and makes drop decision based on a target delay of individual flow. We then present FaLL, a Fair and Low Latency queuing scheme that meets stringent performance requirements of data center networks: fair share of bandwidth, low queuing latency, high throughput, and ease of deployment. FaLL uses an efficiency module, a fairness module and a target delay based dropping scheme to meet these goals. Through rigorous experiments on real testbed, we show that FaLL outperforms various peer solutions in variety of network conditions over data center networks