Efficient UDP-based congestion aware transport for data center traffic

Modern Data Centers (DCs) host hundreds of thousands of servers running diverse applications and services. The variety of these applications mandates distinct requirements such as latency and throughput. The state-of-the-art TCP protocol fails to meet these requirements, rendering the design of efficient DC transport protocols an urgent need. Since UDP is the most popular protocol besides TCP, it is a potential alternative to address this challenging problem. In this paper, we propose DCUDP, a UDP-like protocol for DCs which provides excellent congestion control using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). DCUDP achieves excellent throughput both for normal and short flows through simulations. Furthermore, DCUDP guarantees fairness and convergence during periodic congestions (burstiness). Our experiments show that DCUDP outperforms many TCP-like protocols for data centers in terms of throughput, fairness and convergence. © 2014 IEEE.