Performance evaluation of transport protocols in cloud data center networks

In recent years, cloud data centers have received increased attention by the research community, due to their key function of hosting a big number of cloud applications and services. At the same time, however, various and conflicting requirements have emerged, such as a mixture of different type of flows in shallow buffer switches, which are interconnected via fiber optics in many-to-one network topology. In this environment, the conventional transmission control protocol (TCP) exhibits severe performance degradation. In this paper, the issues affecting TCP performance in data center networks are studied and different congestion control schemes, such as CUBIC, DCTCP, HighSpeed, NewReno and Vegas, are presented and evaluated by means of computer simulations in realistic data center network scenarios. Our results show that DCTCP eliminates the performance problems of conventional TCP in data center networks and exhibits the performance and fairness properties required for efficient network deployment.