A. Greenberg, J. R. Hamilton, N. Jain, S. Kandula, C. Kim, P. Lahiri, D. A. Maltz, P. Patel, S. Sengupta, "VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network," ACM SIGCOMM, (August 2009). [PDF]

Summary

VL2 is a scalable data center architecture to provide uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, Ethernet layer … Continue Reading ››

R. N. Mysore, A. Pamboris, N. Farrington, N. Huang, P. Miri, S. Radhakrishnan, V. Subramanya, A. Vahdat, "PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric", ACM SIGCOMM, (August 2009). [PDF]

Summary

PortLand is a scalable, fault-tolerant, and easily manageable layer 2 routing and forwarding protocol for data center environments that exploits the knowledge … Continue Reading ››

C. Kim, M. Caesar, J. Rexford, "Floodless in SEATTLE: A Scalable Ethernet Architecture for Large Enterprises," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2008). [PDF]

Summary

SEATTLE is an enterprise network architecture that combines the scalability of IP networks with the simplicity of Ethernet without incurring respective drawbacks. It uses flat address space to provide plug-n-play functionality and … Continue Reading ››

S. Kandula, R. Mahajan, P. Verkaik, S. Agarwal, J. Padhye, P. Bahl, "Detailed Diagnosis in Enterprise Networks," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2009). [PDF]

Summary

Diagnosis of generic and application-specific faults in networked systems is known to be notoriously hard due to dynamic and complex interactions between components. This paper presents NetMedic, a system that enables … Continue Reading ››

D. Katabi, M. Handley, C. Rohrs, "Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2002). [PDF]

Summary

Regardless of gateway queueing schemes, TCP becomes inefficient and suffers from instability as per-flow product of bandwidth and delay increases. The main reason is that the existing TCP queueing mechanisms are not fast enough to … Continue Reading ››

S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, "Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, (August 1993). [PDF]

Summary

Random Early Detection or RED detects impending congestion based on average queue size and notifies connections of congestion through binary feedback by dropping packets or by marking bits in headers. To this end, RED uses two … Continue Reading ››

I. Stoica, S. Shenker, H. Zhang, "Core-Stateless Fair Queueing: Achieving Approximately Fair Bandwidth Allocations in High Speed Networks," ACM SIGCOMM, (August 1998). [PDF]

Summary

Fair resource (bandwidth, buffer etc.) allocation algorithms (e.g., Fair Queueing) in routers usually need to manage large number of states, buffers, and has to do packet scheduling on a per … Continue Reading ››

A. Demers, S. Keshav, S. Shenker, "Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm," Internetworking: Research and Experience, 1 (1990), pp. 3-26.

Summary

Congestion control in communication networks can be implemented at the source, where flow control algorithms vary the sending rate, or at the gateway through routing and queueing algorithms. However, implementations at the source … Continue Reading ››

V. Jacobson, M. Karels, "Congestion Avoidance and Control," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 1988). [PDF]

Summary

This paper argues that much of the congestion-related problems (observed circa 1988 in LBL to UC Berkeley connections on 4.3 BSD machines) stem from wrong implementations and bugs in transport protocol, rather than the protocol itself. The authors present examples … Continue Reading ››

D-M Chiu, R. Jain, "Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks," Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 17 (1989), pp 1-14. [PDF]

Summary

"Low delay" and "high throughput", two main operating objectives of a computer network, are frequently hampered by congestion of packets. Once there is a congestion, it takes … Continue Reading ››