Hani Jamjoom and Kang G. Shin
ACM SIGCOMM
Karlsruhe, Germany, August 2003
Abstract. Flash crowd events (FCEs) present a real threat to the
stability of routers and end-servers. Such events
are characterized by a large and sustained spike in
client arrival rates, usually to the point of
service failure. Traditional rate-based drop
policies, such as Random Early Drop (RED), become
ineffective in such situations since clients tend to
be persistent, in the sense that they make multiple
retransmission attempts before aborting their
connection. As it is built into TCP’s congestion
control, this persistence is very widespread, making
it a major stumbling block to providing responsive
aggregate traffic controls. This paper focuses on
analyzing and building a coherent model of the
effects of client persistence on the controllability
of aggregate traffic. Based on this model, we propose
a new drop strategy called persistent dropping to
regulate the arrival of SYN packets and achieves
three important goals: (1) it allows routers and
end-servers to quickly converge to their control
targets without sacrificing fairness, (2) it
minimizes the portion of client delay that is
attributed to the applied controls, and (3) it is
both easily implementable and computationally
tractable. Using a real implementation of this
controller in the Linux kernel, we demonstrate its
efficacy, up to 60% delay reduction for drop
probabilities less than 0.5.
Keywords. Queue Management, Flash Crowd Events, Modeling, Optimization
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-sigcomm-03,
author = {Hani and Jamjoom and Kang G. and Shin},
title = {{Persistent Dropping: An Efficient Control of Traffic Aggregates}},
booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM},
address = {Karlsruhe, Germany},
month = {August},
year = {2003}
}