Host Congestion Control

Abstract

The conventional wisdom in systems and networking communities is that congestion happens primarily within the network fabric. However, adoption of high-bandwidth access links and relatively stagnant technology trends for resources within hosts have led to emergence of host congestion---that is, congestion within the host network that enables data exchange between NIC and CPU/memory. Such host congestion alters the many assumptions entrenched within decades of research and practice of congestion control.