AMRT: Anti-ECN Marking to Improve Utilization of Receiver-driven Transmission in Data Center

Cloud applications generate a variety of workloads ranging from delay-sensitive flows to bandwidth-hungry ones in data centers. Existing reactive or proactive congestion control protocols are hard to simultaneously achieve ultra-low latency and high link utilization across all workloads in data center networks. We present a new receiver-driven transport scheme using anti-ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) marking to achieve both near-zero queueing delay and full link utilization by reasonably increasing sending rate in the case of under-utilization. Specifically, switches mark the ECN bit of data packets once detecting spare bandwidth. When receiving the anti-ECN marked packet, the receiver generates the corresponding marked grant to trigger more data packets. The experimental results of small-scale testbed implementation and large-scale NS2 simulation show that AMRT effectively reduces the average flow completion time (AFCT) by up to 40.8% and improves the link utilization by up to 36.8% under high workload over the state-of-the-art receiver-driven transmission schemes.