RobinHood: Collaborative Burst Mitigation Through in-Network Packet Deflection

Microbursts - microsecond-scale congestion events - are a major cause of packet loss and performance degradation in modern datacenter networks. While packet deflection techniques can help manage microbursts, current implementations lead to excessive packet reordering, exacerbated congestion under high load, and head-of-line blocking in switch buffers. In this paper, we design and implement RobinHood, a novel in-network burst-tolerant protocol. At its core, the protocols mechanisms and policies are based on work-stealing, a technique originally designed to reduce job completion times in operating systems. Through extensive trace-driven simulations on leaf-spine and fattree topologies, we show that RobinHood improves flow completion times up to 22% over Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP), and up to 7% over recent solutions, DIBS and Vertigo, under high load scenarios.