STCC: A SDN‐oriented TCP congestion control mechanism for datacenter network

Abstract

Abstract Due to characteristics of high bandwidth and low latency, datacenter networks ensure tremendous data could be transmitted in an efficient way. However, in many‐to‐one transmission scenarios, high concurrency of TCP flows aggravates network congestion and causes overflows in switches, seriously impairing network performance. To solve the problem, a TCP congestion control mechanism based on software‐defined networking (STCC) is proposed. Without any modification in TCP stack, STCC monitors network performance through centralized control and global network view of SDN, employs a routing algorithm based on the minimum path bandwidth utilization rate to forward packets and uses different methods to adjust congestion windows of senders so that network congestion can be greatly mitigated. An experiment platform is built to carry out simulation tests for evaluating STCC, and the results show that under the same network conditions, STCC effectively reduces the number of retransmission timeout of senders and noticeably raises network throughput, compared with other congestion control algorithms.

Keywords

• computer centres
• telecommunication congestion control
• telecommunication network routing
• telecommunication traffic
• transport protocols