Uranus: Congestion-proportionality among slices based on Weighted Virtual Congestion Control.

Modern data centers are the host for multitude of large-scale distributed applications. These applications generate tremendous amount of network flows to complete their tasks. At this scale, efficient network control manages the network traffic at the level of flow aggregates (or slices) who need to share the network with respect to operator’s proportionality policy. Existing slice scheduling mechanisms can not meet this goal in multi-path data center networks. Hence, in this paper, we aim to fulfil this goal and satisfy the congestion proportionality policy for network sharing. The policy is applied to the traffic traversing congested links in the network. We propose Uranus, a novel slice scheduler based on a combination of flow-level control mechanisms. The scheduler implements two-tier weight allocation to individual flows. Then, relying on a non-blocking big switch abstraction, slice weights are allocated at the inter-rack level by aggregating the weights of rack-to-rack flows. Finally, Uranus can dynamically divide the rack-level weight to its constituent flows. We also implement Weighted Virtual Congestion Control (WVCC), an end-host shim-layer that enforces weighted bandwidth sharing among competing flows. Trace-driven NS3 simulations demonstrate that Uranus closely approximates the congestion-proportionality and is able to improve the proportional fairness by 31.49% compared to the state-of-the-art mechanisms. The results also prove Uranus’s capability of intra-slice scheduling optimization. Moreover, Uranus’s throughput in Clos fabrics outperforms the state-of-the-art mechanisms by 10%.