Innovative Bursty Traffic Control Technique to Overcome Outcast Problem in Cloud Computing Environment

摘要

The promising services offered by cloud computing environments have led to huge amount of data that need to be processed and stored. Wireless cloud networks rely on TCP/IP protocols for reliable transfer of data traffic between the cloud end-users and servers and vise-versa. Even though, TCP has been successful for several applications it, however, does not perform well in wireless cloud environments. The many-to-one communication pattern used in such environments with such huge amount of data resulted in TCP incast problem. TCP outcast problem happens when traffic that consists of connections of many incoming flows and few flows at two ports of a switch/router compete for one common output port, the throughput of the few flows is affected implicitly. It occurs in the cloud environment where routers and switches of the data centres operate Tail-Drop (TD) queue management mechanism as it has less implementation complexity and less computational overhead compared to other queue management mechanisms. However, the use of TD leads to frequent and multiple successive packet drops from the queue of a specific port which contributes to frequent timeouts and severe global synchronization occasions. TCP outcast problem can be mitigated by minimizing the queue occupancy level at the routers and switches of the cloud networks. This study presents an innovative technique for controlling TCP bursty traffic to overcome outcast problem in cloud computing environment. The performance evaluation of the proposed technique shows that it improves the performance of the cloud networks in terms of fairness represented by less delay and queue length and comparable data throughput achieved.