Project Domain / Category

Networking

Abstract / Introduction

Web applications are gradually shifting into cloud environments. These cloud services are hosted on huge scale computation and storage infrastructures called data centers (DC) (e.g. Google’s data center, Facebook’s data center etc.). In a largescale data center, hundreds of thousands of servers are connected through switches in a symmetric topology. A data center network (DCN) interconnects all the data center resources. Data Center TCP (DCTCP) is a modified version of TCP which is proposed specifically for intra-DCN communication [1].

DCTCP, although, performs significantly better than TCP in data centers but still suffers from performance issues; DCTCP incurs significant packet drops due to bursty flow arrivals (many-to-one communication).

This project aims to:

  1. Identify the causes of packet drops in the event of bursty arrivals.
  2. Propose solution(s) to mitigate the packet loss issue.

The problem will be studied by simulating DCN environment in network simulator ns-2. In addition, the proposed solution will also be implemented in ns-2.


Working in ns-2 requires:


  1. Understanding of basic commands of Linux operating systems (for ns-2 installation and running purposes).
  2. Good programming skills in C++ (for simulating the DCN environment and making the required changes in DCTCP).
  3. Programming in TCL (for writing simulation scripts).
  4. Understanding of AWK command (for trace text processing).
  5. Understanding GNUPLOT command (for drawing graphs).

References


[1] Alizadeh, M., Greenberg, A., Maltz, D. A., Padhye, J., Patel, P., Prabhakar, B., ... & Sridharan, M. (2011). Data center tcp (dctcp). ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review, 41(4), 63-74. 

Intended Outcome

Implementation, in ns-2, of modifications in DCTCP to reduce packet drops

Required Skills

1. Understanding of basic Linux commands
2. C++, TCL, AWK and GNUPLOT (for working in ns-2)