STRIDE: Single-Trip-time based Reliable Data Transport Protocol for the Reconfigurable Cloud

In a recent development, reconfigurable clouds become a viable solution to overcome practical problems in clouds, such as scalability, delay, etc., by offloading computation tasks to reconfigurable hardware, FPGA. Several existing techniques, such as TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) and Lightweight Transport Layer (LTL), are still hard to be implemented in real-world deployment due to large overhead or stringent dependency of the underlying network. In this paper, we propose STRIDE, a novel inter-FPGA data communication protocol, to provide reliable end-to-end communication which addresses practical problems in deployment. In our design, STRIDE leverages FPGA's abilities through programming, such as precise timestamping, to make more accurate measurement on end-to-end delay and deliver more precise control in managing traffic in cloud. We implement STRIDE on a FPGA-based network experimental platform and demonstrate that STRIDE reduces various hardware resources consumption by 36% to 49% compared to TOE. Additionally, it also improves flow completion time in comparison to TOE by 2.2X. We further demonstrate STRIDE outperforms DCTCP and TCP-Vegas in OMNET simulator by up to 1.8X and 2.3X on average and 99th percentile respectively in large scale setting.