Title: Congestion management in overlay networks

Authors: Fouad Benamrane; Ali Sanhaji; Philippe Niger; Philippe Cadro

Addresses: Orange Labs LANNION, 2 avenue Pierre Marzin, France ' Orange Labs LANNION, 2 avenue Pierre Marzin, France ' Orange Labs LANNION, 2 avenue Pierre Marzin, France ' Orange Labs LANNION, 2 avenue Pierre Marzin, France

Abstract: Network congestion is a problem that could affect seriously the network performance if it is not taken into consideration especially in overlays network used in cloud environments. While congestion in these environments happens in the underlay network, the source of the congestion may come from virtual machines located in the overlay. Our contribution is to provide real-time mechanisms to manage congestion from overlay networks. The steps of congestion reaction are as follows. First, we monitor and identify a congestion event using explicit congestion notification (ECN) mechanism. Second, we take a decision to react to congestion when the estimated congestion during monitoring exceeds a tolerated threshold. Last, we react to the congestion to improve network performance by limiting the throughput of virtual machines in the overlay network. Through a proof of concept, we show the efficiency of our implementation to react to the congestion when the threshold exceeded the defined limits.

Keywords: overlays; performance; explicit congestion notification; ECN; congestion; OpenStack.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2019.106100

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2019 Vol.15 No.3/4, pp.183 - 190

Received: 03 Aug 2018
Accepted: 09 Jun 2019
Published online: 30 Mar 2020 *

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