Congestion Control Mechanisms for Data Center Networks

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Congestion Control Mechanisms for Data Center Networks"

by

Mr. Wei BAI


Abstract:

In recent years, many data centers have been built around the world to 
provide various services to global users. Many applications within the 
data center have very demanding latency requirements. Even a small delay 
due to the network congestion can directly affect application performance 
and degrade user experience. Therefore, how to handle the congestion in 
data center networks is very important.

The thesis focuses on congestion control mechanisms for data center 
networks. Specifically, we make following three contributions.

First, we present PIAS, a flow scheduling mechanism to minimize the flow 
completion time. PIAS does not assume the prior knowledge of the flow size 
information and can be easily implemented using commodity switch hardware 
and legacy network stacks.

Second, we show that existing Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) 
marking schemes suffer from various performance impairments in 
multi-service multi-queue data centers. Then we propose MQ-ECN, a new ECN 
marking scheme for round-robin schedulers that are widely used in today's 
data centers.

Third, driven by the recent effort in programmable schedulers, we design 
TCN, which can enable ECN for arbitrary packet schedulers in data centers.


Date:			Friday, 2 December 2016

Time:                 	4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3494
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Dr. Kai Chen (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Qian Zhang (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Gary Chan
 			Dr. Wei Wang


**** ALL are Welcome ****