NetDraino: Saving Network Resources via Selective Packet Drops

Contemporary end-servers and network-routers rely on traffic shaping to deal with server overload and network congestion. Although such traffic shaping provides a means to mitigate the effects of server overload and network congestion, the lack of cooperation between end-servers and network-routers results in waste of network resources. To remedy this problem, we design, implement, and evaluate NetDraino, a novel mechanism that extends the existing queue-management schemes at routers to exploit the link congestion information at downstream end-servers. Specifically, NetDraino distributes the servers' traffic-shaping rules to the congested routers. The routers can then selectively discard those packets-as early as possible-that overloaded downstream servers will eventually drop, thus saving network resources for forwarding in-transit packets destined for non-overloaded servers. The functionality necessary for servers to distribute these filtering rules to routers is implemented within the Linux iptables and iproute2 architectures. Both of our simulation and experimentation results show that NetDraino significantly improves the overall network throughput with minimal overhead.