Hierarchical Adaptive Learning-Based Congestion Control With Low Training Overhead for Datacenter Networks

Most congestion control mechanisms perform well in specific datacenter networks, but none can consistently deliver good performance across varying scenarios. Recently proposed frameworks based on reinforcement learning can flexibly select congestion control algorithms to adapt to dynamic network. However, frequently altering the congestion control mechanisms during relatively stable periods of the network actually leads to instability and unnecessary computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and hierarchical adaptive congestion control algorithm (LACC) to be resilient to the varying network. LACC dynamically selects the appropriate congestion control mechanism only when the current congestion control algorithm is not suitable for the current network state, rather than changing the congestion control scheme every training cycle to ensure network stability. The simulation results show that LACC significantly reduces the average overhead by 31% and improves throughput by up to 47%, 35%, 23% and 15% compared to Cubic, Reno, BBR and Antelope, respectively.