SICC: SDN-based incast congestion control for data centers

Due to the partition/aggregate nature of many distributed cloud-based applications, incast traffic carried by TCP abounds in data center networks. TCP, being agnostic to such applications' traffic patterns and their delay-sensitivity, cannot cope with the resulting congestion events, leading to severe performance degradation. The co-existence of such incast traffic with other throughput-demanding elastic traffic flows in the network worsens the performance degradation further. In this paper, relying on the programmability of Software Defined Networks (SDN), we address this problem in an efficient and easily deployable manner. The proposed SDN-based incast congestion control framework relies on the SDN controller and the hypervisor programmability to solve such congestion problems without altering the guest virtual machines nor the network switches. We assess the performance of the proposed scheme via real deployment in a small-scale testbed and ns2 simulation in larger environments.