Scheduling Coflows with Incomplete Information

In recent years, the coflow abstraction has received significant attentions, for its prominent ability to capture application semantics. On this basis, multiple coflow scheduling mechanisms have been proposed to minimize the coflow completion time (CCT). Currently, existing coflow scheduling mechanisms mainly belong to two categories: information-omniscient and information-agnostic. However, in data center applications, there are still quite a few cases in between where incomplete coflow information is known, and such incomplete information makes great contributions to improving the CCT performance. To address such cases, we propose IICS, a coflow scheduling algorithm based on incomplete coflow information. IICS leverages information of a coflow's arrived parts to deduce the coflow's remaining transmission time, and uses it to approximate the Minimum Remaining Time First (MRTF) heuristic. Besides, IICS allocates bandwidth by monopolization and in a maximal manner, which achieves high bandwidth utilization. Extensive simulations under realistic settings show that IICS achieves the average CCT comparable to that of the information-omniscient algorithm and the 99th percentile CCT much smaller than both information-omniscient and information-agnostic algorithms. Furthermore, IICS holds observably higher throughput and is robust to algorithm parameters.