Absorbing Microbursts Without Headroom for Data Center Networks

Abstract

In data center networks, handling microbursts is crucial to user experience because the microburst causes excessive packet losses in shallow buffered switches. Explicit congestion notification (ECN) enables the switch to absorb microbursts by leaving buffer headroom, but has a fundamental trade-off between latency and throughput. In this letter, we propose LossPass, a switch port management scheme that achieves low latency and high throughput simultaneously. LossPass breaks the trade-off of ECN by absorbing microbursts without headroom. Intensive benchmark results demonstrate that LossPass reduces the average and tail latency of small flows while maintaining line-rate throughput.