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Summary Many recent studies show that data center networks usually mix with a large amount of latency‐agnostic background flows and a large number of latency‐sensitive flows. The former, although contributing most of the traffic, is deadline‐agnostic, while the latter always confronts a soft‐real‐time constraint, namely deadline. Missing this deadline may cause performance impairment. For this reason, directly using the traditional TCP in data center networks, which is deadline‐agnostic, may suffer from performance and efficiency problems. Recently, many works improve on TCP to address this problem. But all of them focus on the latency‐sensitive flows themselves. Because latency‐sensitive flows, although large in number, only account for a small part of traffic, these methods cannot effectively ensure deadline for the latency‐sensitive flows. In this paper, we propose Make‐way, a new data center network transport protocol for satisfying the deadlines of latency‐sensitive flows. In Make‐way, just as what the name depicts, once a latency‐sensitive flow encounters congestion, the latency‐agnostic background flows will make way for it. Especially, Make‐way does not need any special hardware support of modification. For the latency‐agnostic flows in data center networks usually contribute the majority traffic, by doing so, the latency‐sensitive flows may be transported nonblockingly in data center networks and thus can meet their deadlines. Extensive simulation results show that Make‐way can meet the deadlines of latency‐sensitive flows with a probability of more than 97%. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.