Swarm-based incast congestion control in datacenters serving web applications

Abstract

In Web applications served by datacenter nowadays, the incast congestion at the front-end server seriously degrades the data request latency performance due to the vast data transmissions from a large number data servers for a data request in a short time. Previous incast congestion control methods usually consider the direct data transmissions from data servers to the front-end server, which makes it difficult to control the sending speed or adjust workloads due to the transient transmission of only a few data objects from each data server. In this paper, we propose a Swarm-based Incast Congestion Control (SICC) system. SICC forms all target data servers of one request in the same rack into a swarm. In each swarm, a data server (called hub) is selected to forward all data objects to the front-end server, so that the number of data servers concurrently connected to the front-end server is reduced, which avoids the incast congestion. Also, the continuous data transmission from hubs to the front-end server facilitates the development of other strategies to further control the incast congestion. To fully utilize the bandwidth, SICC uses a two-level data transmission speed control method to adjust the data transmission speeds of hubs. A query redirection method further reduces the request latency by balancing the transmission remaining times between hubs. Our experiments in simulation and on a real cluster demonstrate that SICC outperforms other incast control methods in improving throughput and reducing the data request latency.