FastCredit: Expediting credit-based congestion control in datacenters

Receiver-driven transports that leverage hop-by-hop credits have the merits of fast convergence, short queueing, and strong congestion avoidability, making them high-efficiency in managing congestion in current high-speed data centers. However, these transport protocols treat long and latency-sensitive short flows equally, increasing flow completion times and affecting user experiences. Although flow scheduling mechanisms have been studied extensively, they are hard to be deployed into hop-by-hop credit-based transports. The root cause is that most traditional flow scheduling mechanisms mainly work in the long queue containing flows of various sizes, while credit-based proactive transports maintain the extremely short bounded queue.