FaLL: A fair and low latency queuing scheme for data center networks

Low latency, high throughput, and fairness are the stringent performance requirements of data center networks. For web applications continue to thrive, data center must remain effective by addressing these challenges. While most of the challenges have been handled by data center specific transport protocols (e.g. DCTCP), these transport protocols are not default options for data center users. Free choice of transport protocols demands careful consideration for an effective solution. We argue that queuing scheme at layer-2 switches hold the key to address these issues. Therefore, in this paper, we present FaLL, a queuing scheme for data center networks that meets following performance requirements: fair share of bandwidth, low queuing latency, high throughput, and ease of deployment. FaLL uses an efficiency module, a fairness module and a target delay based dropping scheme to meet these goals. FaLL requires very small amount of state information. Through rigorous experiments on real testbed, we show that FaLL outperforms various peer solutions in variety of network conditions.