On meeting deadlines in datacenter networks

Datacenters have become increasingly important to host a diverse range of cloud applications with mixed workloads. Traditional applications hosted by datacenters are throughput-oriented without delay requirements, but newer generations of cloud applications, such as web search, recommendations, and social networking, typically employ a tree-based Partition-Aggregate structure, which may incur bursts of traffic. As a result, flows in these applications have stringent latency requirements, i.e., flow deadlines need to be met in order to achieve a satisfactory user experience. To meet these flow deadlines, research efforts in the recent literature have attempted to redesign flow and congestion control protocols that are specific to datacenter networks. In this paper, we focus on the new array of deadline-sensitive flow control protocols, thoroughly investigate their underlying design principles, analyze the evolution of their designs, and evaluate the tradeoffs involved in their design choices.