Maelstrom: Transparent Error Correction for Communication Between Data Centers

Author

Balakrishnan, Mahesh ; Marian, Tudor ; Birman, Kenneth P. ; Weatherspoon, Hakim ; Ganesh, Lakshmi

Author_Institution

Microsoft Res. Silicon Valley, Mountain View, CA, USA

Volume

19

Issue

3

fYear

2011

fDate

6/1/2011 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

617

Lastpage

629

Abstract

The global network of data centers is emerging as an important distributed systems paradigm-commodity clusters running high-performance applications, connected by high-speed “lambda” networks across hundreds of milliseconds of network latency. Packet loss on long-haul networks can cripple applications and protocols: A loss rate as low as 0.1% is sufficient to reduce TCP/IP throughput by an order of magnitude on a 1-Gb/s link with 50-ms one-way latency. Maelstrom is an edge appliance that masks packet loss transparently and quickly from intercluster protocols, aggregating traffic for high-speed encoding and using a new forward error correction scheme to handle bursty loss.

Keywords

computer centres; computer network reliability; forward error correction; telecommunication traffic; transport protocols; Maelstrom; TCP/IP throughput; bit rate 1 Gbit/s; data centers; distributed system paradigm; forward error correction scheme; high-speed lambda networks; intercluster protocols; long-haul networks; packet loss; time 50 ms; transparent error correction; Encoding; Forward error correction; IP networks; Maintenance engineering; Optical losses; Receivers; Throughput; Data centers; TCP/IP; forward error correction (FEC);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1063-6692

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TNET.2011.2144616

Filename

5765714