Load Balancing Using ECMP in Multi-Stage Clos Topology in a Datacenter
Harpreet Kaur Dhaliwal, Chung–Horng Lung · 2018
Datacenters most widely use 3-stage Clos topologies such as fat-tree topology and leaf-spine topology. These network topologies may face challenges at scale in future as the datacenters are growing at a large scale. Therefore, 5-stage Clos topology is explored in this paper with its benefits. The paper focuses on load balancing of elephant flows using Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) algorithm. This leads to improvement in performance of 5-stage Clos topology which leads to decrease in number of failures that are incurred because of unavailable bandwidth. This performance is compared to 3-stage Clos in terms of time taken by a request for completion and the number of failures appeared in the network during the simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the 5-stage Clos topology performs better in terms of network reliability due to less number of packet losses and it also shows comparable results to 3-stage Clos for the processing time taken by the requests inside the datacenter network.