This work adds the DataCenter TCP (DCTCP) congestion control
algorithm [1], which has been first published at SIGCOMM 2010 [2],
resp. follow-up analysis at SIGMETRICS 2011 [3] (and also, more
recently as an informational IETF draft available at [4]).

DCTCP is an enhancement to the TCP congestion control algorithm for
data center networks. Typical data center workloads are i.e.
i) partition/aggregate (queries; bursty, delay sensitive), ii) short
messages e.g. 50KB-1MB (for coordination and control state; delay
sensitive), and iii) large flows e.g. 1MB-100MB (data update;
throughput sensitive). DCTCP has therefore been designed for such
environments to provide/achieve the following three requirements:

  * High burst tolerance (incast due to partition/aggregate)
  * Low latency (short flows, queries)
  * High throughput (continuous data updates, large file
    transfers) with commodity, shallow buffered switches

The basic idea of its design consists of two fundamentals: i) on the
switch side, packets are being marked when its internal queue
length > threshold K (K is chosen so that a large enough headroom
for marked traffic is still available in the switch queue); ii) the
sender/host side maintains a moving average of the fraction of marked
packets, so each RTT, F is being updated as follows:

 F := X / Y, where X is # of marked ACKs, Y is total # of ACKs
 alpha := (1 - g) * alpha + g * F, where g is a smoothing constant

The resulting alpha (iow: probability that switch queue is congested)
is then being used in order to adaptively decrease the congestion
window W:

 W := (1 - (alpha / 2)) * W

The means for receiving marked packets resp. marking them on switch
side in DCTCP is the use of ECN.

RFC3168 describes a mechanism for using Explicit Congestion Notification
from the switch for early detection of congestion, rather than waiting
for segment loss to occur.

However, this method only detects the presence of congestion, not
the *extent*. In the presence of mild congestion, it reduces the TCP
congestion window too aggressively and unnecessarily affects the
throughput of long flows [4].

DCTCP, as mentioned, enhances Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
processing to estimate the fraction of bytes that encounter congestion,
rather than simply detecting that some congestion has occurred. DCTCP
then scales the TCP congestion window based on this estimate [4],
thus it can derive multibit feedback from the information present in
the single-bit sequence of marks in its control law. And thus act in
*proportion* to the extent of congestion, not its *presence*.

Switches therefore set the Congestion Experienced (CE) codepoint in
packets when internal queue lengths exceed threshold K. Resulting,
DCTCP delivers the same or better throughput than normal TCP, while
using 90% less buffer space.

It was found in [2] that DCTCP enables the applications to handle 10x
the current background traffic, without impacting foreground traffic.
Moreover, a 10x increase in foreground traffic did not cause any
timeouts, and thus largely eliminates TCP incast collapse problems.

The algorithm itself has already seen deployments in large production
data centers since then.

We did a long-term stress-test and analysis in a data center, short
summary of our TCP incast tests with iperf compared to cubic:

This test measured DCTCP throughput and latency and compared it with
CUBIC throughput and latency for an incast scenario. In this test, 19
senders sent at maximum rate to a single receiver. The receiver simply
ran iperf -s.

The senders ran iperf -c <receiver> -t 30. All senders started
simultaneously (using local clocks synchronized by ntp).

This test was repeated multiple times. Below shows the results from a
single test. Other tests are similar. (DCTCP results were extremely
consistent, CUBIC results show some variance induced by the TCP timeouts
that CUBIC encountered.)

For this test, we report statistics on the number of TCP timeouts,
flow throughput, and traffic latency.

1) Timeouts (total over all flows, and per flow summaries):

            CUBIC            DCTCP
  Total     3227             25
  Mean       169.842          1.316
  Median     183              1
  Max        207              5
  Min        123              0
  Stddev      28.991          1.600

Timeout data is taken by measuring the net change in netstat -s
"other TCP timeouts" reported. As a result, the timeout measurements
above are not restricted to the test traffic, and we believe that it
is likely that all of the "DCTCP timeouts" are actually timeouts for
non-test traffic. We report them nevertheless. CUBIC will also include
some non-test timeouts, but they are drawfed by bona fide test traffic
timeouts for CUBIC. Clearly DCTCP does an excellent job of preventing
TCP timeouts. DCTCP reduces timeouts by at least two orders of
magnitude and may well have eliminated them in this scenario.

2) Throughput (per flow in Mbps):

            CUBIC            DCTCP
  Mean      521.684          521.895
  Median    464              523
  Max       776              527
  Min       403              519
  Stddev    105.891            2.601
  Fairness    0.962            0.999

Throughput data was simply the average throughput for each flow
reported by iperf. By avoiding TCP timeouts, DCTCP is able to
achieve much better per-flow results. In CUBIC, many flows
experience TCP timeouts which makes flow throughput unpredictable and
unfair. DCTCP, on the other hand, provides very clean predictable
throughput without incurring TCP timeouts. Thus, the standard deviation
of CUBIC throughput is dramatically higher than the standard deviation
of DCTCP throughput.

Mean throughput is nearly identical because even though cubic flows
suffer TCP timeouts, other flows will step in and fill the unused
bandwidth. Note that this test is something of a best case scenario
for incast under CUBIC: it allows other flows to fill in for flows
experiencing a timeout. Under situations where the receiver is issuing
requests and then waiting for all flows to complete, flows cannot fill
in for timed out flows and throughput will drop dramatically.

3) Latency (in ms):

            CUBIC            DCTCP
  Mean      4.0088           0.04219
  Median    4.055            0.0395
  Max       4.2              0.085
  Min       3.32             0.028
  Stddev    0.1666           0.01064

Latency for each protocol was computed by running "ping -i 0.2
<receiver>" from a single sender to the receiver during the incast
test. For DCTCP, "ping -Q 0x6 -i 0.2 <receiver>" was used to ensure
that traffic traversed the DCTCP queue and was not dropped when the
queue size was greater than the marking threshold. The summary
statistics above are over all ping metrics measured between the single
sender, receiver pair.

The latency results for this test show a dramatic difference between
CUBIC and DCTCP. CUBIC intentionally overflows the switch buffer
which incurs the maximum queue latency (more buffer memory will lead
to high latency.) DCTCP, on the other hand, deliberately attempts to
keep queue occupancy low. The result is a two orders of magnitude
reduction of latency with DCTCP - even with a switch with relatively
little RAM. Switches with larger amounts of RAM will incur increasing
amounts of latency for CUBIC, but not for DCTCP.

4) Convergence and stability test:

This test measured the time that DCTCP took to fairly redistribute
bandwidth when a new flow commences. It also measured DCTCP's ability
to remain stable at a fair bandwidth distribution. DCTCP is compared
with CUBIC for this test.

At the commencement of this test, a single flow is sending at maximum
rate (near 10 Gbps) to a single receiver. One second after that first
flow commences, a new flow from a distinct server begins sending to
the same receiver as the first flow. After the second flow has sent
data for 10 seconds, the second flow is terminated. The first flow
sends for an additional second. Ideally, the bandwidth would be evenly
shared as soon as the second flow starts, and recover as soon as it
stops.

The results of this test are shown below. Note that the flow bandwidth
for the two flows was measured near the same time, but not
simultaneously.

DCTCP performs nearly perfectly within the measurement limitations
of this test: bandwidth is quickly distributed fairly between the two
flows, remains stable throughout the duration of the test, and
recovers quickly. CUBIC, in contrast, is slow to divide the bandwidth
fairly, and has trouble remaining stable.

  CUBIC                      DCTCP

  Seconds  Flow 1  Flow 2    Seconds  Flow 1  Flow 2
   0       9.93    0          0       9.92    0
   0.5     9.87    0          0.5     9.86    0
   1       8.73    2.25       1       6.46    4.88
   1.5     7.29    2.8        1.5     4.9     4.99
   2       6.96    3.1        2       4.92    4.94
   2.5     6.67    3.34       2.5     4.93    5
   3       6.39    3.57       3       4.92    4.99
   3.5     6.24    3.75       3.5     4.94    4.74
   4       6       3.94       4       5.34    4.71
   4.5     5.88    4.09       4.5     4.99    4.97
   5       5.27    4.98       5       4.83    5.01
   5.5     4.93    5.04       5.5     4.89    4.99
   6       4.9     4.99       6       4.92    5.04
   6.5     4.93    5.1        6.5     4.91    4.97
   7       4.28    5.8        7       4.97    4.97
   7.5     4.62    4.91       7.5     4.99    4.82
   8       5.05    4.45       8       5.16    4.76
   8.5     5.93    4.09       8.5     4.94    4.98
   9       5.73    4.2        9       4.92    5.02
   9.5     5.62    4.32       9.5     4.87    5.03
  10       6.12    3.2       10       4.91    5.01
  10.5     6.91    3.11      10.5     4.87    5.04
  11       8.48    0         11       8.49    4.94
  11.5     9.87    0         11.5     9.9     0

SYN/ACK ECT test:

This test demonstrates the importance of ECT on SYN and SYN-ACK packets
by measuring the connection probability in the presence of competing
flows for a DCTCP connection attempt *without* ECT in the SYN packet.
The test was repeated five times for each number of competing flows.

              Competing Flows  1 |    2 |    4 |    8 |   16
                               ------------------------------
Mean Connection Probability    1 | 0.67 | 0.45 | 0.28 |    0
Median Connection Probability  1 | 0.65 | 0.45 | 0.25 |    0

As the number of competing flows moves beyond 1, the connection
probability drops rapidly.

Enabling DCTCP with this patch requires the following steps:

DCTCP must be running both on the sender and receiver side in your
data center, i.e.:

  sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=dctcp

Also, ECN functionality must be enabled on all switches in your
data center for DCTCP to work. The default ECN marking threshold (K)
heuristic on the switch for DCTCP is e.g., 20 packets (30KB) at
1Gbps, and 65 packets (~100KB) at 10Gbps (K > 1/7 * C * RTT, [4]).

In above tests, for each switch port, traffic was segregated into two
queues. For any packet with a DSCP of 0x01 - or equivalently a TOS of
0x04 - the packet was placed into the DCTCP queue. All other packets
were placed into the default drop-tail queue. For the DCTCP queue,
RED/ECN marking was enabled, here, with a marking threshold of 75 KB.
More details however, we refer you to the paper [2] under section 3).

There are no code changes required to applications running in user
space. DCTCP has been implemented in full *isolation* of the rest of
the TCP code as its own congestion control module, so that it can run
without a need to expose code to the core of the TCP stack, and thus
nothing changes for non-DCTCP users.

Changes in the CA framework code are minimal, and DCTCP algorithm
operates on mechanisms that are already available in most Silicon.
The gain (dctcp_shift_g) is currently a fixed constant (1/16) from
the paper, but we leave the option that it can be chosen carefully
to a different value by the user.

In case DCTCP is being used and ECN support on peer site is off,
DCTCP falls back after 3WHS to operate in normal TCP Reno mode.

ss {-4,-6} -t -i diag interface:

  ... dctcp wscale:7,7 rto:203 rtt:2.349/0.026 mss:1448 cwnd:2054
  ssthresh:1102 ce_state 0 alpha 15 ab_ecn 0 ab_tot 735584
  send 10129.2Mbps pacing_rate 20254.1Mbps unacked:1822 retrans:0/15
  reordering:101 rcv_space:29200

  ... dctcp-reno wscale:7,7 rto:201 rtt:0.711/1.327 ato:40 mss:1448
  cwnd:10 ssthresh:1102 fallback_mode send 162.9Mbps pacing_rate
  325.5Mbps rcv_rtt:1.5 rcv_space:29200

More information about DCTCP can be found in [1-4].

  [1] http://simula.stanford.edu/~alizade/Site/DCTCP.html
  [2] http://simula.stanford.edu/~alizade/Site/DCTCP_files/dctcp-final.pdf
  [3] http://simula.stanford.edu/~alizade/Site/DCTCP_files/dctcp_analysis-full.pdf
  [4] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bensley-tcpm-dctcp-00

Joint work with Florian Westphal and Glenn Judd.
Signed-off-by: NDaniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: NFlorian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
Signed-off-by: NGlenn Judd <glenn.judd@morganstanley.com>
Acked-by: NStephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Signed-off-by: NDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>