Abstract
Network devices today share buffer across output queues to avoid drops during transient congestion with less buffer space, thus with a lower cost, per chip. While effective most of the time, this sharing can cause undesired interactions among seemingly independent traffic, especially in case of high load. As a result, low-priority traffic can cause increased packet loss to high-priority traffic, intra-DC traffic can impair WAN throughput and long flows can prevent the buffer for absorbing incoming bursts. The cause of this perhaps unintuitive outcome is today’s buffer sharing techniques that are unable to guarantee isolation even to a small portion of the traffic, without statically allocating buffer space. To address this issue we designed Plasticine a novel buffer management scheme which offers strict isolation guarantees without keeping the buffer idle and is practical in today’s hardware. We found that Plasticine: (i) significantly improves query completion times (≈>30% compared to state-of-the-art solution) while achieving on-par throughput compared to convectional buffer management algorithms as well as TCP nuances; (ii) improves short-flow completion times; Our proposal is the first attempt to address the problems of bursts in today’s data center networks from a buffer management perspective.
Cite this work
BibTeX entry
@thesis{masterthesis,
thesis = {Masters Thesis},
title = {Plasticine: A flexible buffer management scheme for data center networks},
author = {Addanki, Vamsi},
year = {2020}
}