An application-level solution for the TCP-incast problem in data center networks

Data centers have become very popular for storing large volumes of data. In particular, companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo! routinely use data centers for storage, Web search, and large-scale computations. The main characteristics of a data center network are high-speed links, low propagation delays, and limited-size switch buffers. In addition, the data for a given client application are usually striped (spread) over many servers, for increased reliability and performance (i.e., parallelism). Recent research efforts have resulted in several architectures of data centers [1].