An SDN based fast rerouting mechanism for elephant flows in DCN
Weifei Zang, Zijin Jin, Julong Lan · 2017
Data Center Networks (DCNs) should provide low latency and high throughput to meet users' demands. However the coexistence of mice and elephant flows may jeopardize achieving both performance objectives simultaneously. Existing load agnostic routing techniques work well for mice flows but make elephant flows collide on the same output port, creating an avoidable bottleneck. In this paper, we present an SDN based Fast Rerouting Mechanism (SFRM) for rescheduling elephant flows in a load-aware manner. An elephant flow selecting module is added into the controller to reschedule elephant flows selectively and reroutes a few elephant flows by Segment Routing (SR) technique. Simulations show that SFRM improves the network throughput and reduces the Flow Completion Time (FCT) significantly.