Software-defined Buffer Management and Robust Congestion Control for Modern Datacenter Networks

  Modern datacenter network applications continue to demand ultra low latencies and very high throughputs. At the same time, network infrastructure keeps achieving higher speeds and larger bandwidths. We still need better network management solutions to keep these two demand and supply fronts go hand-in-hand. There are key metrics that define network performance such as flow completion time (the lower the better), throughput (the higher the better), and end-to-end latency (the lower the better) that are mainly governed by how effectively network application get their fair share of network resources. We observe that buffer utilization on network switches gives a very accurate indication of network performance. Therefore, network buffer management is important in modern datacenter networks, and other network management solutions can be efficiently built around buffer utilization. This dissertation presents three solutions based on buffer use on network switches.

  This dissertation consists of three main sections. The first section is on a specification language for buffer management in modern programmable switches. The second section is on a congestion control solution for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networks. The third section is on a solution to head-of-the-line blocking in modern datacenter networks.