Isolating Mice and Elephant in Data Centers

Abstract

Data centers traffic is composed by numerous latency-sensitive "mice" flows, which is consisted of only several packets, and a few throughput-sensitive "elephant" flows, which occupy more than 80% of overall load. Generally, the short-lived "mice" flows induce transient congestion and the long-lived "elephant" flows cause persistent congestion. The network congestion is a major performance inhibitor. Conventionally, the hop-by-hop and end-to-end flow control mechanisms are employed to relief transient and persistent congestion, respectively. However, in face of the mixture of elephants and mice, we find the hybrid congestion control scheme including hop-by-hop and end-to-end flow control mechanisms suffers from serious performance impairments. As a step further, our in-depth analysis reveals that the hybrid scheme performs poor at latency of mice and throughput of elephant. Motivated by this understanding, we argue for isolating mice and elephants in different queues, such that the hop-by-hop and end-to-end flow control mechanisms are independently imposed to short-lived and long-lived flows, respectively. Our solution is readily-deployable and compatible with current commodity network devices and can leverage various congestion control mechanisms. Extensive simulations show that our proposal of isolation can simultaneously improve the latency of mice by at least 30% and the link utilization to almost 100%.