SA-TCP: A Novel Approach to Mitigate TCP Incast in Data Center Networks

In high bandwidth and low latency data center networks, when multiple data senders simultaneously communicate with a single receiver, namely in many-to-one communication pattern, it is frequently occurred that the burst data overload the receiver's switch buffers, which leads to TCP throughput collapse. This phenomenon is termed to TCP Incast problem, which has become a new hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel TCP congestion control algorithm named Stochastic Adjustment TCP (SA-TCP) which can stochastically adjust the congestion control window to avoid the synchronization among many parallel flows. The experimental results verify that SA-TCP can mitigate TCP Incast effectively.