Title: QuickCast: Fast and Efficient Inter-Datacenter Transfers using Forwarding Tree Cohorts,
Abstract: Large inter-datacenter transfers are crucial for cloud service efficiency and
are increasingly used by organizations that have dedicated wide area networks
between datacenters. A recent work uses multicast forwarding trees to reduce
the bandwidth needs and improve completion times of point-to-multipoint
transfers. Using a single forwarding tree per transfer, however, leads to poor
performance because the slowest receiver dictates the completion time for all
receivers. Using multiple forwarding trees per transfer alleviates this
concern--the average receiver could finish early; however, if done naively,
bandwidth usage would also increase and it is apriori unclear how best to
partition receivers, how to construct the multiple trees and how to determine
the rate and schedule of flows on these trees. This paper presents QuickCast, a
first solution to these problems. Using simulations on real-world network
topologies, we see that QuickCast can speed up the average receiver's
completion time by as much as $10\times$ while only using $1.04\times$ more
bandwidth; further, the completion time for all receivers also improves by as
much as $1.6\times$ faster at high loads.