On performance-adaptive flow control for large data transfer in high speed networks

Several research and production high-performance networks now provision multi-Gbps dedicated channels to meet the demands of large data transfers in network-intensive applications. However, end users have not seen corresponding increase in application throughput mainly because (i) the existence of high-bandwidth links has shifted the congestion from the network to end hosts, and (ii) such congestion is not well handled by TCP's Additive Increase and Multiplicative Decrease algorithm. Particularly, due to the sharing with unknown background workloads, the data receiver oftentimes lacks sufficient system resources to process the arriving packets, hence leading to significant packet drops at the end system. This paper proposes a UDP-based transport method that incorporates a performance-adaptive flow control mechanism to regulate the activities of both the sender and receiver in response to system dynamics to achieve high throughput. We construct a mathematical model for the socket receive buffer and data receiving process, and employ a profiling-based method to estimate the initial receiving bottleneck rate, which is dynamically adjusted and sent back to the sender for source rate control. The sending rate is stabilized at the estimated bottleneck rate based on a stochastic approximation algorithm. We test the proposed method on a local dedicated connection and the experimental results illustrate its superior performance over existing methods.