Deadline-Aware Data-Credit-Coupled Transmission for Data Centers

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), data centers are facing growing performance demands for flow deadline requirements, other to the low latency and high throughput. To address congestion issues that affect the performance of data center networks, this paper proposes D2C4, a deadline-aware data-credit coupled congestion control scheme. By tightly coupled data-credit integration using an ECN-based feedback loop, D2C4 minimizes credit waste while a credit-driven scheduler meets IoT applications’ flow deadlines. The key innovations of D2C4 include: 1) Data-credit coupling for performance gains; 2) ECN-based credit rate control reducing waste; 3) Deadline-sensitive credit-based flow scheduling to meet flow deadline demands. We conduct extensive experiments of D2C4 through small-scale DPDK-based tests and large-scale OMNeT++ simulations. Experimental results show that D2C4 outperforms existing protocols in flow completion time, throughput, deadline miss ratio, and packet drop.