Scalable Congestion Control Protocol Based on SDN in Data Center Networks

On-line data center applications render challenging network latency demands to meet their service level requirements. These applications, however, frequently suffer from increased latency due to the packet loss and queueing delay at the network switches. These are mainly as a result of the momentary massive bursts by the Partition/Aggregation application traffic patterns, which causes incast network congestion at the network switches. In this paper, we propose a scalable congestion control protocol, called SCCP. Our scheme effectively limits the data rate of the TCP senders by leveraging the Software Defined Networking (SDN) switches, so that the total utilization does not exceed the bottleneck link capacity. Furthermore, SCCP can be easily deployed to the existing SDN data center switches by extending the OpenFlow specifications. Our Open vSwitch-based prototype experiments and ns-3 simulations show that SCCP is scalable for up to hundreds of concurrent flows traversing through the data center network switch port.