TCon: A Transparent Congestion Control Deployment Platform for Optimizing WAN Transfers

Abstract

Nowadays, many web services (e.g., cloud storage) are deployed inside datacenters and may trigger transfers to clients through WAN. TCP congestion control is a vital component for improving the performance (e.g., latency) of these services. Considering complex networking environment, the default congestion control algorithms on servers may not always be the most efficient, and new advanced algorithms will be proposed. However, adjusting congestion control algorithm usually requires modification of TCP stacks of servers, which is difficult if not impossible, especially considering different operating systems and configurations on servers. In this paper, we propose TCon, a lightweight , flexible and scalable platform that allows administrators (or operators) to deploy any appropriate congestion control algorithms transparently without making any changes to TCP stacks of servers. We have implemented TCon in Open vSwitch (OVS) and conducted extensive test-bed experiments by transparently deploying BBR congestion control algorithm over TCon. Test-bed results show that the BBR over TCon works effectively and the performance stays close to its native implementation on servers, reducing latency by 12.76% on average.

A Fine-grained and Transparent Congestion Control Enforcement Scheme

“…Mystique should allow network administrators or operators to enforce advanced congestion controls without touching TCP stacks of servers. Deployment and operations of Mystique should be transparent to both web servers and clients [12,15,20]. Besides, Mystique should be able to apply different congestion controls on a perflow basis and switch congestion control according to current network status, and consume as less resource as possible.…”

“…Recent years have seen many Web applications moved into cloud datacenters to take advantage of the economy of scale. It is well known that Web latency inversely correlates with revenue and profit [20]. Reducing latency is of profound importance for providers [7].…”

Modest BBR: Enabling Better Fairness for BBR Congestion Control

“…With extensive experimental evaluations, it is demonstrated that BBR can achieve high throughput and low latency [3]. Some studies show that BBR work quite well for a single flow at a bottleneck [1] [3] [4].…”