Revisiting Congestion Control for Lossless Ethernet

Explore a cutting-edge conference talk on congestion control for lossless Ethernet presented at NSDI '24. Delve into the research conducted by Yiran Zhang, Qingkai Meng, Chaolei Hu, and Fengyuan Ren from Tsinghua University and other institutions. Discover how they approach this classic topic from a fresh perspective, focusing on understanding and exploiting the intrinsic properties of lossless networks. Learn about their experimental and analytical findings on packet conservation and its implications for estimating pipe capacity and excessive packets. Examine the principles they derive for handling congested flows and victim flows to efficiently address head-of-line blocking. Gain insights into their proposed ACK-driven congestion control (ACC) method, which uses ACK time series knowledge to precisely manage congestion in lossless Ethernet. Understand how ACC improves upon existing schemes, addressing fundamental issues like congestion spreading, head-of-line blocking, and deadlock while achieving excellent low latency and high throughput performance. Explore the significant improvements in average and 99th percentile Flow Completion Time (FCT) for small flows compared to existing methods.