DVL-Lossy: Isolating Congesting Flows to Optimize Packet Dropping in Lossy Data-Center Networks

The performance of lossy data-center networks (DCNs) may degrade due to packet dropping (and possible retransmission) under congestion. In this article, we propose and evaluate a solution to deal with congestion in lossy DCNs, based on the same approach as the dynamic virtual lanes technique, previously proposed for lossless DCNs. This approach consists of isolating congesting flows in special queues, so that they do not share queues with noncongesting ones. This reduces the probability of standard queues becoming congested, thus reducing the dropping (and retransmission) of noncongesting packets and improving network performance. The experiment results confirm that these benefits are achieved by adding just a single special queue per switch port.