An OpenFlow-based performance-oriented multipath forwarding scheme in datacenters
Bo Liu, Ming Chen, Bo Xu, Hui Hu, Chao Hu, Qing-yun Zuo, Changyou Xing · Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering · 2016
Although dense interconnection datacenter networks (DCNs) (e.g., FatTree) provide multiple paths and high bisection bandwidth for each server pair, the widely used single-path Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and equal-cost multipath (ECMP) transport protocols cannot achieve high resource utilization due to poor resource excavation and allocation. In this paper, we present LESSOR, a performance-oriented multipath forwarding scheme to improve DCNs’ resource utilization. By adopting an OpenFlow-based centralized control mechanism, LESSOR computes near-optimal transmission path and bandwidth provision for each flow according to the global network view while maintaining nearly real-time network view with the performance-oriented flow observing mechanism. Deployments and comprehensive simulations show that LESSOR can efficiently improve the network throughput, which is higher than ECMP by 4.9%–38.3% under different loads. LESSOR also provides 2%–27.7% improvement of throughput compared with Hedera. Besides, LESSOR decreases the average flow completion time significantly.