Abstract
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has recently been suggested as a promising transport protocol to boost the utilization of underlaying datacenter networks, yet it also increases the host CPU power consumption. It remains unclear whether datacenters can indeed benefit from using MPTCP from the perspective of energy efficiency. Through realworld measurement of MPTCP, we show that the energy efficiency of MPTCP is largely related to the flow completion time and the existence of link-sharing subflows. In particular, we find that the link-sharing subflows in MPTCP will significantly elevate the CPUs' power consumption on hosts. To make the matter worse, it will also reduce the transmission efficiency for both throughput-sensitive long flows and latency-sensitive short flows. To address such a problem, we present MPTCP-D, an energy-efficient enhancement of MPTCP in datacenter networks. MPTCP-D incorporates a novel congestion control algorithm that improves energy efficiency by minimizing the flow completion time. It also has a build-in subflow elimination mechanism that precludes link-sharing subflows from increasing the host CPU power consumption. We implement MPTCP-D in the Linux kernel, analyze the parameter selection in the algorithm and study its performance through packet-level simulation and on Amazon EC2. Our results show that, without degrading the performance of the long flow throughput and the short flow completion time, MPTCP-D reduces the long flow energy consumption by up to 72% compared to DCTCP for data transfers, and reduces the short flow power consumption by up to 46% compared to MPTCP with link-sharing subflows.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8932384 |
| Pages (from-to) | 57-70 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Manuscript received May 29, 2017; revised January 19, 2018, September 30, 2018, January 26, 2019, and July 22, 2019; accepted October 8, 2019; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor A. Bremler-Barr. Date of publication December 13, 2019; date of current version February 14, 2020. This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, in part by the Industrial Canada Technology Demonstration Program (TDP) Grant, and in part by the EVCAA R&S Grant from the University of Minnesota at Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA. The work of Chi Xu was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61602214. The work of Changqiao Xu was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61871048 and Grant 61872253. An earlier version of this work appeared in IEEE INFOCOM’17. (Corresponding author: Jiangchuan Liu.) J. Zhao, J. Liu, and C. Xu are with the School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada (e-mail: zhaojiaz@sfu.ca; jcliu@cs.sfu.ca; xuchi.int@gmail.com).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1993-2012 IEEE.
Keywords
- Multipath TCP
- congestion control
- datacenters
- energy efficiency
- link-sharing subflows
