Zhang et al (2011) Shrinking MTU to Mitigate TCP Incast Throughput Collapse in Data Center Networks (ICCMC)

A short paper that proposes to use a smaller MTU to solve the incast problem. As the buffer size is fixed, a smaller packet means the buffer can hold more packets, and then it allows the TCP window to be “larger”. A larger TCP window is easier to catch packet drops by duplicated acknowledgement. Therefore make it less possible to have TCP timeout.

Bibliographic data

@inproceedings{
   title = "Shrinking MTU to Mitigate TCP Incast Throughput Collapse in Data Center Networks",
   author = "Peng Zhang and Hongbo Wang and Shiduan Cheng",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of Third International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing",
   year = "2011",
}