Distributed resolution of network congestion and potential deadlock using reservation-based scheduling

Efficient and reliable communication is essential for achieving high performance in a networked computing environment. Finite network resources bring about unavoidable competition among in-flight network packets, resulting in network congestion and, possibly, deadlock. Many techniques have been proposed to improve network performance by efficiently handling network congestion and potential deadlock. However, none of them provide an efficient way of accelerating the movement of network packets in congestion toward their destinations. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism for detecting and resolving network congestion and potential deadlocks. The proposed mechanism is based on efficiently tracking paths of congestion and increasing the scheduling priority of packets along those paths. This acts to throttle other packets trying to enter those congested regions - in effect, locking out packets from congested regions until congestion has had the opportunity to disperse. Simulation results show that the proposed technique effectively disperses network congestion and is also applicable in helping to resolve potential deadlock.