End-System Aware, Rate-Adaptive Protocol for Network Transport in LambdaGrid Environments

Abstract

Next-generation e-Science applications will require the ability to transfer information at high data rates between distributed computing centers and data repositories. A LambdaGrid offers dedicated, optical, circuit-switched, point-topoint connections that can be reserved exclusively for such applications. These dedicated high-speed connections eliminate network congestion as seen in traditional Internet, but they effectively push the network congestion to the end systems, as processing speeds cannot keep up with networking speeds. Thus, developing an efficient transport protocol over such high-speed dedicated circuits is of critical importance.We propose the idea of a end-system aware, rate-adaptive protocol for network transport, based on end-system performance monitoring. Our proposed protocol significantly improves the performance of data transfer over LambdaGrids by intelligently adapting the sending rate based on end-system constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol and illustrate the performance gains achieved via wide-area network emulation.

TCP_SDF: Transport Control to Achieve Smooth Data Flow at a Stable Throughput

“…Such research efforts include Hurricane [27], UDT [12], FRTP [32], PAUDP [10], Tsunami [4], RBUDP/LambdaStream [13], [30], RAPID/RAPID+ [6], [9], [7], LambdaStream [30], and many others (see [14] for overviews). We observed that even though UDP-based protocols were set up to send at a fixed rate, the throughput achieved was lower than the sending rate.…”

Making a Case for Proactive Flow Control in Optical Circuit-Switched Networks

“…Although being a proactive approach, a major drawback of this protocol is that it is difficult to predict the exact time when the receive process will be suspended. It is even more difficult to match the sender's transmission suspension with the receive process' suspend interval, especially because the two nodes are physically separated by a reasonable amount of network delay [2]. Moreover, stopping data transmission completely is a drastic step to take when we aim at keeping the network utilization high.…”

“…An enhancement of RAPID and RBUDP+ is RAPID+ [2], which focuses on dynamically monitoring the packet loss at the receiving end host, so that it can be used to adapt the sending rate. Accurate prediction of when packet loss would occur increases performance and circuit utilization.…”