Paper Review

Safe and Effective Fine-grained TCP Retransmissions for Datacenter Communication

Muhamad Erza Aminanto

Student ID: 20145562
Cryptology and Information Security Laboratory
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and technology
aminanto@kaist.ac.kr

Abstract—This paper review contains review to “Safe and
Effective Fine-grained TCP Retransmissions for Datacenter
Communication” from V. Vasudevan. First, I will explain about
summary of this paper. The main problem of this paper is TCP
incast problem. Then the solution proposed by the Authors is
reducing RTO to 1 ms or lower. After that, I have summarize
implementation and evaluation of this solution. Then, I will
describe two related research. Afterwards, I have expressed my
opinion about this paper, also about its advantages and
disadvantages.
Keywords—TCP incast; RTO; RTT; Data Center;
I. SUMMARY
This section contains 3 parts, first is problem domain that
the writer want to solve, then solutions offered by them and last
is their implementations and evaluations to their solutions.
A. Problem Domain
This paper want to solve problem about TCP incast. TCP
incast problem is the throughput was falling down when
multiple clients communicate to single server in TCP
networks that have high-bandwidth and low delay. The very
fast data transmissions overfill Ethernet switch buffers that
causing intense packet loss, then leads to TCP timeouts or
Retransmission Time Out (RTO). The main concern of the
writer was the value of RTO usually 200 milliseconds while
most of Round-Trip-Time (RTT) value is tens or hundreds
microseconds. They thought that this gap is too large/wide,
and they want to minimize this gap. The writer said that they
faced 3 challenges to solve this problem: first, they want to
show their solution is practical. Second, they want to show
effectiveness of their solution. Last, they want to show that
their solution is safe to implement in wide-area.
Also, the writer stated preconditions for TCP incast occurs
in follow conditions:
 The networks have high bandwidth and low
latency, also switches with small buffers.
 The clients using parallel barrier-synchronized
requests which only send another request if all
responses from earlier request have been
received.
 The server only responding with a small amount
of data for each request.
B. Solutions
They propose a solution to prevent TCP incast problem.
The solution is reducing RTO sharply until approximately
have same order to network delay/RTT. Based on their
simulation and real-world study, they able to show that
reducing RTO until 1 milliseconds was effective to prevent
TCP incast problem for small amount of concurrent senders
(i.e. 8-16 senders).
C. Implementation and Evaluation Summarize
They are using Linux kernel 2.6.28 for implement their
solution. This Linux kernel have limitation that the TCP RTO
may reduced only to 5 ms. So, they modified the kernel to use
microsecond-accurate timers. After this modification, they can
reduce RTO to 1 ms even in 200 microseconds. The results of
their implementation is the RTO should be reduced to 1 ms or
lower to prevent TCP incast problem. Actually, their
implementation have some minor differences with their
simulation as shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3. The differences
was caused by some factors, like RTT variances and physical
delay. Although there are minor differences, this research still
able to shown that reduced RTO may prevent TCP incast
problem. Also, the Author concerned about the importance of
desynchronizing retransmissions by adding some randomness
to the RTO. It becomes necessary to avoid throughput dropped
as the amount of low-latency flows growing highly.
II. RELATED WORK
Related paper to this paper is “Taming TCP Incast
Throughput Collapse in Data Center Networks” from J. Zhang.
This paper presents a simple and effective TCP enhanced
mechanism, called GIP (Guarantee Important Packets), for the
applications with the TCP incast problem. The main idea is
making TCP aware of the boundaries of the stripe units, and
reducing the congestion window of each flow at the start of
each stripe unit as well as redundantly transmitting the last
packet of each stripe unit. GIP modifies TCP a little at the end
hosts, thus it can be easily implemented.
The second related paper is “Data Center TCP (DCTCP)”
from M. Alizadeh. This paper also concerned about TCP incast
problem. This paper offer solution with modify TCP protocol
by adding Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
III. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
The advantages of solution offered in this paper is the
reduced RTO was proofed safe to use in wide area (WAN
environment). On the other hand, the disadvantages of the
solution is the reduced RTO is can’t prevent dropping
throughput in large number of servers simulation as shown in
Figure 6.
IV. MY OPINION
Overall, I like this paper. The Authors have a good and
structured writing. Also they have explained kernel
modification in detail. Then, I think ECN might be another
solution for this TCP incast problem. Also, maybe it will better
if this research is implemented to real Data Center with large
amount of servers.
REFERENCES
[1] V. Vasudevan, et.al., “Safe and Effective Fine-grained TCP
Retransmissions for Datacenter Communication,” SIGCOMM’09,
August 17–21, 2009, Barcelona, Spain. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-
60558-594-9/09/08.
[2] M. Alizadeh, et.al., “Data Center TCP (DCTCP),” SIGCOMM’10,
August 30–September 3, 2010, New Delhi, India.. Copyright 2010.
[3] J. Zhang, et.al., “Taming TCP Incast Throughput Collapse in Data
Center Networks,” IEEE 2013 978-1-4799-1270-4/13.
[4] ______, “TCP Timeout and Retransmission,” [Online]. Available at:
http://www.pcvr.nl/tcpip/tcp_time.htm#21_2
[5] Brad Hedlund, “TCP Incast and Cloud Application Performance,”
[Online]. Available at: http://bradhedlund.com/2011/05/01/tcp-incast-
and-cloud-application-performance/