A Case for Queue-to-Queue, Back-Pressure-Based Congestion Control for Grid Networks

Standard "new-Reno" TCP faces some performance limitations in very high throughput IP WAN networks, (e.g., computing grids) due to a long end-to-end congestion feedback loop and a conservative behaviour with respect to congestion. We investigate breathing new life into the following idea: implement aggressive congestion control via hop-by-hop, link-level flow control (back-pressure). Studying TCP's behaviour at the packet level on an emulated WAN link allows us to explain: a) the dependence between TCP performance and burstiness at the Ethernet level; b) the performance and fairness gains obtained by the activation of Ethernet 802.3x flow control. Recognising that data moves not from hop to hop but from queue-to-queue, regardless of the layer, we propose to refine previous hop-by-hop approaches to a new "Network of Queues" (NoQ) approach, where each network buffer protects itself against overflow, thus preventing global network congestion. We finally identify a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: PDPTA
• Authors: Marc Herbert, Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet
• Keywords: Flow Control, Implement Aggressive Congestion, Long End-to-end Congestion, PDPTA 2004, PDPTA 2007