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Mitigating TCP Incast Issue in Cloud Data Centres using Software-Defined Networking (SDN): A Survey

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most widely used protocol in the cloud data centers today. However, cloud data centers using TCP experience many issues as TCP was designed based on the assumption that it would primarily be used in Wide Area Networks (WANs). One of the major issues with TCP in the cloud data centers is the Incast issue. This issue arises because of the many-to-one communication pattern that commonly exists in the modern cloud data centers. In many-to-one communication pattern, multiple senders simultaneously send data to a single receiver. This causes packet loss at the switch buffer which results in TCP throughput collapse that leads to high Flow Completion Time (FCT). Recently, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been used by many researchers to mitigate the Incast issue. In this paper, a detailed survey of various SDN based solutions to the Incast issue is carried out. In this survey, various SDN based solutions are classified into four categories i.e. TCP Receive Window based solutions, Tuning TCP Parameters based solutions, Quick Recovery based solutions and Application Layer based solutions. All the solutions are critically evaluated in terms of their principles, advantages, and shortcomings. Another important feature of this survey is to compare various SDN based solutions with respect to different performance metrics e.g. maximum number of concurrent senders supported, calculation of delay at the controller etc. These performance metrics are important for deployment of any SDN based solution in modern cloud data centers. In addition, future research directions are also discussed in this survey that can be explored to design and develop better SDN based solutions to the Incast issue.