LossPass: Absorbing Microbursts by Packet Eviction for Data Center Networks

Gyuyeong Kim, Wonjun Lee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A bursty traffic pattern, called the microburst, is a key hurdle to achieve low latency for user-facing applications because it causes excessive packet losses in shallow buffered switches. Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) can absorb microbursts by reserving buffer headroom, but the existence of headroom results in a fundamental trade-off between latency and throughput. To this end, we present LossPass, a buffer sharing mechanism that absorbs microbursts as many as possible while maintaining line-rate throughput. Specifically, LossPass evicts buffered large flow packets to make free buffer space on demand for arriving small flow packets. Our solution is inexpensive to implement on hardware. We implement a LossPass prototype and evaluate its performance through extensive testbed experiments and large-scale simulations. Our evaluation results show that LossPass reduces the FCT of small flows while maintaining line-rate throughput. For example, in testbed experiments, LossPass outperforms ECN by up to 3.20× in the 99th percentile FCT of small flows.

Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
DOIs
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
IEEE

Keywords

  • Cloud computing
  • Data center switches
  • Data centers
  • Hardware
  • Low latency
  • Packet loss
  • Packet loss
  • Switches
  • Throughput
  • Transport protocols

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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