Explicit Rate Control for Anypoint Communication

This paper investigates explicit multiflow rate control for common forms of ensemble communication. We address rate control in the context of the Anypoint, a communication model that combines strong transport-layer guarantees with the flexibility of Anycast-style indirection. For example, Anypoint supports cluster-based services where extensible routers at the network edge route inbound requests according to pluggable service-specific redirection policies. Anypoint also supports multipoint-to-point communication in the reverse or outbound direction. Our approach extends recent work on an Explicit Control Protocol (XCP) and demonstrates compelling benefits for multiflow rate control. For example, it allows us to unify flow and congestion control for multipoint traffic. The explicit rate control approach defines a set of XCP header transformations to split and merge XCP traffic flows in an Anypoint edge router. We describe a prototype XCP-enabled transport protocol and Anypoint-XCP switch implementing the split/merge transformations. Experimental results evaluate our approach in a prototype Anypoint cluster in the ModelNet emulation environment, extended with support for emulated XCP routers. The results show how Anypoint-XCP flows compete fairly with conventional XCP flows and meet a range of multiflow rate control objectives in a flexible and efficient way.