David Zats and Anand Padmanabha Iyer and Randy H. Katz and Ion Stoica and Amin Vahdat

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2013-113

May 20, 2013

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-113.pdf

The drive towards richer, more interactive content places increasingly stringent latency requirements on datacenters. A critical component of meeting these is ensuring that the network responds agilely to congestion, bounding network latency and improving high-percentile flow completion times.

We propose a new approach to rapidly detecting and responding to congestion. We introduce FastLane, a congestion signaling mechanism that allows senders to respond more quickly. By delivering signals to senders with high probability and low latency, FastLane allows them to retransmit packets sooner, avoiding resource-wasting timeouts. It also enables senders to make more informed decisions by differentiating between out-of-order delivery and packet loss. We demonstrate through simulation and implementation that FastLane reduces high-percentile flow completion times by over 80% by effectively managing congestion hot-spots. These benefits come at minimal cost - FastLane consumes no more than 2% of bandwidth and 5% of buffers.

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BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Zats:EECS-2013-113,
    Author= {Zats, David and Padmanabha Iyer, Anand and Katz, Randy H. and Stoica, Ion and Vahdat, Amin},
    Title= {FastLane: An Agile Congestion Signaling Mechanism for Improving Datacenter Performance},
    Year= {2013},
    Month= {May},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-113.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2013-113},
    Abstract= {The drive towards richer, more interactive content places increasingly stringent latency requirements on datacenters. A critical component of meeting these is ensuring that the network responds agilely to congestion, bounding network latency and improving high-percentile flow completion times.

We propose a new approach to rapidly detecting and responding to congestion. We introduce FastLane, a congestion signaling mechanism that allows senders to respond more quickly. By delivering signals to senders with high probability and low latency, FastLane allows them to retransmit packets sooner, avoiding resource-wasting timeouts. It also enables senders to make more informed decisions by differentiating between out-of-order delivery and packet loss. We demonstrate through simulation and implementation that FastLane reduces high-percentile flow completion times by over 80% by effectively managing congestion hot-spots. These benefits come at minimal cost - FastLane consumes no more than 2% of bandwidth and 5% of buffers.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Zats, David 
%A Padmanabha Iyer, Anand 
%A Katz, Randy H. 
%A Stoica, Ion 
%A Vahdat, Amin 
%T FastLane: An Agile Congestion Signaling Mechanism for Improving Datacenter Performance
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2013
%8 May 20
%@ UCB/EECS-2013-113
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-113.html
%F Zats:EECS-2013-113