Revisiting Flow-Based Load Balancing: Stateless Path Selection in Data Center Networks

Mon, 12/24/2012 - 11:50 by Gregory Detal

Abstract

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.

Authors
Gregory Detal, Christoph Paasch, Simon van der Linden, Pascal Mérindol, Gildas Avoine and Olivier Bonaventure
Source
Computer Networks, 57(5):1204–1216, April 2013.
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