Loss rate control mechanism for fan-in-burst traffic in Data Center Network

Congestion scenarios in Data Center Network (DCN) arise due to burst traffic and cause packet drop to take place thus reducing the overall throughput. Flow scheduling techniques in DCN do not address well the network congestions. Congestion control techniques uses congestion notifications from network core to deal with congestion scenario. Software defined networking techniques use link load information in access switches to react to congestion scenarios. Both the mechanisms operate on post-congestion scenario to deal with sustained burst traffic. In fat tree topology based DCN architectures proactive measures for handling burst traffic at lower layers will be more beneficial. In this paper, we implement traffic shaping mechanism in the edge switch at source that act proactively and prevent the propagation of ill effects due to sustained burst. Further, we evaluate its impact on the overall packet loss and delay. The entire DCN is simulated using Colored Petri Nets (CPN). The packet loss rates observed at the receiver edge switch for various flow patterns reveals cent percent packet transfer which signifies the effectiveness of the proactive congestion control mechanism. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.