Internal congestion control in a cluster-based router

Congestion is a problem in any distributed system. In this paper, we present and evaluate a congestion control scheme to manage congestion internal to a cluster-based router. Our results show that it is possible to improve the overall forwarding rate of the router by reducing the injection rate of traffic to the internal network when the router is under heavy load. Our control algorithm is based on backward explicit congestion notification combined with a novel method for queue scheduling. We find that the forwarding rate of our prototype router can be increased by nearly 33% while the traffic in the internal network can be reduced by up to 59%. Fair allocation of resources under overload is guaranteed by our scheme.

[1]  Rayadurgam Srikant,et al.  Controlling the Internet: a survey and some new results , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[2]  QUTdN QeO,et al.  Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance , 1993, TNET.

[3]  Qinghua Ye,et al.  Hardware bottleneck evaluation and analysis of a software PC-based router , 2008, 2008 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

[4]  Raj Jain,et al.  Congestion Control in Computer Networks: Trends and Issues , 1990, IEEE Netw..

[5]  Derong Liu.  The Mathematics of Internet Congestion Control , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[6]  Frank Kelly,et al.  Rate control for communication networks: shadow prices, proportional fairness and stability , 1998, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[7]  R. Srikant,et al.  An adaptive virtual queue (AVQ) algorithm for active queue management , 2004, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[8]  Steven H. Low,et al.  Optimization flow control—I: basic algorithm and convergence , 1999, TNET.

[9]  Van Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, SIGCOMM '88.

[10]  R. Wilder,et al.  Wide-area Internet traffic patterns and characteristics , 1997, IEEE Netw..

[11]  Steven H. Low,et al.  REM: active queue management , 2001, IEEE Netw..

[12]  Mike H. MacGregor,et al.  Cluster-based IP Router: Implementation and Evaluation , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing.

[13]  Adel Said Elmaghraby,et al.  A fair backward explicit congestion control scheme for ATM network , 1999, Proceedings IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications (Cat. No.PR00250).

[14]  Eddie Kohler,et al.  The Click modular router , 1999, SOSP.