GraphCC: A Practical Graph Learning-based Approach to Congestion Control
  in Datacenters
Guillermo Bernárdez José Suárez-Varela Xiang Shi Shihan Xiao Xiangle Cheng Pere Barlet-Ros Albert Cabellos-Aparicio
Congestion Control (CC) plays a fundamental role in optimizing traffic in
Data Center Networks (DCN). Currently, DCNs mainly implement two main CC
protocols: DCTCP and DCQCN. Both protocols -- and their main variants -- are
based on Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), where intermediate switches
mark packets when they detect congestion. The ECN configuration is thus a
crucial aspect on the performance of CC protocols. Nowadays, network experts
set static ECN parameters carefully selected to optimize the average network
performance. However, today's high-speed DCNs experience quick and abrupt
changes that severely change the network state (e.g., dynamic traffic
workloads, incast events, failures). This leads to under-utilization and
sub-optimal performance. This paper presents GraphCC, a novel Machine
Learning-based framework for in-network CC optimization. Our distributed
solution relies on a novel combination of Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
(MARL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNN), and it is compatible with widely
deployed ECN-based CC protocols. GraphCC deploys distributed agents on switches
that communicate with their neighbors to cooperate and optimize the global ECN
configuration. In our evaluation, we test the performance of GraphCC under a
wide variety of scenarios, focusing on the capability of this solution to adapt
to new scenarios unseen during training (e.g., new traffic workloads, failures,
upgrades). We compare GraphCC with a state-of-the-art MARL-based solution for
ECN tuning -- ACC -- and observe that our proposed solution outperforms the
state-of-the-art baseline in all of the evaluation scenarios, showing
improvements up to $20\%$ in Flow Completion Time as well as significant
reductions in buffer occupancy ($38.0-85.7\%$).