Short TCP flows that are critical for many interactive applications in data
centers are plagued by large flows and head-of-line blocking in switches.
Hash-based load balancing schemes such as ECMP aggravate the matter and result
in long-tailed flow completion times (FCT). Previous work on reducing FCT
usually requires custom switch hardware and/or protocol changes. We propose
RepFlow, a simple yet practically effective approach that replicates each short
flow to reduce the completion times, without any change to switches or host
kernels. With ECMP the original and replicated flows traverse distinct paths
with different congestion levels, thereby reducing the probability of having
long queueing delay. We develop a simple analytical model to demonstrate the
potential improvement of RepFlow. Extensive NS-3 simulations and Mininet
implementation show that RepFlow provides 50%--70% speedup in both mean and
99-th percentile FCT for all loads, and offers near-optimal FCT when used with
DCTCP.Comment: To appear in IEEE INFOCOM 201
