Revisiting flow-based load balancing: Stateless path selection in data center networks

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• 作者：Gregory Detal^a ; ^{gregory.detal@uclouvain.be}Author Vitae ; Christoph Paasch^a ; ^{christoph.paasch@uclouvain.be}Author Vitae ; Simon van der Linden^a ; ^{simon.vanderlinden@uclouvain.be}Author Vitae ; Pascal Mé ; rindol^b ; ^{merindol@unistra.fr}Author Vitae ; Gildas Avoine^a ; ^{gildas.avoine@uclouvain.be}Author Vitae ; Olivier Bonaventure^a ; ^{olivier.bonaventure@uclouvain.be}Author Vitae
• 关键词：Load balancing ; Data center networks ; MultiPath TCP
• 刊名：Computer Networks
• 出版年：2013
• 出版时间：7 April, 2013
• 年：2013
• 卷：57
• 期：5
• 页码：1204-1216
• 全文大小：1280 K

文摘

Hash-based load-balancing techniques are widely used to distribute the load over multiple forwarding paths and preserve the packet sequence of transport-level flows. Forcing a long-lived, i.e., elephant, flow to follow a specific path in the network is a desired mechanism in data center networks to avoid crossing hot spots. This limits the formation of bottlenecks and so improves the network use. Unfortunately, current per-flow load-balancing methods do not allow sources to deterministically force a specific path for a flow.

In this paper, we propose a deterministic approach enabling end hosts to steer their flows over any desired load-balanced path without relying on any packet header extension. By using an invertible mechanism instead of solely relying on a hash function in routers, our method allows to easily select the packet¡¯s header field values in order to force the selection of a given load-balanced path without storing any state in routers.

We perform various simulations and experiments to evaluate the performance and prove the feasibility of our method using a Linux kernel implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate with simulations and lab experiments how MultiPath TCP can benefit from the combination of our solution with a flow scheduling system that efficiently distributes elephant flows in large data center networks.