Pulser: Fast Congestion Response Using Explicit Incast Notifications for Datacenter Networks

Datacenter applications frequently cause incast congestion, which degrades short flows’ flow completion times and long flows’ throughput. Existing congestion control schemes (e.g., DCTCP) do not explicitly detect and isolate incast. Instead, they rely on existing Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to react to general congestion. They, therefore, lose performance due to slow, cautious, and inaccurate reaction to incast. We propose a novel algorithm that detects incasts and notifies senders using a new Explicit Incast Notification EIN). We show that our incast detection is fast and accurate. Next, we present our congestion control scheme, called Pulser , which isolates incasts using EIN. Unlike DCTCP, which gradually adjusts sending rate, Pulser drastically backs off during incast and rapidly restores sending rate once incast ends (i.e., like a pulse). Our real experiments and ns-3 simulations show that Pulser outperforms prior schemes, DCTCP and ICTCP, in both flow completion times and throughput.