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Reducing web latency with coding-based fast multi-path loss recovery

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Abstract

TCP latency is critical to the performance of Web services. However, packet loss greatly impairs the TCP performance due to its poor loss recovery mechanisms. Recent work FUSO addressed this problem by leveraging multi-path diversity for proactive loss recovery, i.e., using “good” paths to proactively retransmit the potentially lost packet on “bad” paths before they are retransmitted after duplicate ACKs or timeout. Nevertheless, since it has no clue about which packet is (or will be) lost, FUSO simply proactively retransmits the oldest unACKed packet whenever there is a chance for proactive loss recovery. Through analysis and comprehensive experiments, we show that although FUSO behaves well in data center networks, which it is originally designed for, in the Internet scenario, such simple proactive retransmission of the oldest unACKed packet is not accurate enough to recover the lost packets, which causes performance penalty. To address the problem, this paper presents CoFUSO, a Coding-Based Fast Multi-Path Loss Recovery. Different from FUSO, when there is a chance for proactive loss recovery, CoFUSO generates a coding packet that codes all (or multiple) unACKed packets together. As such, CoFUSO can always proactively retransmit the “right” lost packet, since the receiver side can decode the lost packet by combining the coding packet with other received packets. We implement CoFUSO in Linux kernel with \(\sim\)2K lines of code. Testbed and simulation results show that, under lossy condition, CoFUSO can greatly improve the average and 99th percentile flow completion time (FCT) by \(\sim\)12% and \(\sim\)59% in the testbed, and up to \(\sim\)16.9% and \(\sim\)54.5% in the simulation, respectively.

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Notes

  1. “Sub-flows” and “paths” are interchangeably used in the paper.

  2. For ease of presentation, in this paper, TCP refers to both TCP and multi-path transport such as MPTCP [21] used for accessing web services. They have the same basic loss recovery mechanism, i.e., through duplicate ACKs and RTOs.

  3. Encoding is quick in RS-code so we mainly consider decoding time.

  4. RS-code uses online encoding which requires no extra buffer at the sender side.

  5. Note that we also adopt the receiving side optimization in FUSO to directly push the sub-flow data packet into the data-level receive buffer.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Xiaoning Zhan for his help on refining the paper. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 6187060280, in part by the Tencent Rhino-Bird Open Research Fund, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, China

    Yi Liu, Guihua Zhou & Guo Chen

  2. Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory (PDL), Changsha, China

    Guo Chen

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  1. Yi Liu
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  2. Guihua Zhou
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  3. Guo Chen
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Correspondence to Guo Chen.

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Liu, Y., Zhou, G. & Chen, G. Reducing web latency with coding-based fast multi-path loss recovery. Wireless Netw 27, 195–209 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-020-02443-8

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