BurstBalancer: Do Less, Better Balance for Large-Scale Data Center Traffic
Zirui Liu, Yikai Zhao, Zhuochen Fan, Tong Yang, Xiaodong Li, Ruwen Zhang, Kai-Cheng Yang, Zihan Jiang, Zheng Zhong, Yi Sheng Huang, Cong Liu, Jing Hu, Gaogang Xie, Bin Cui · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems · 2023
Layer-3 load balancing is a key topic in the networking field. It is well acknowledged that flowlet is the most promising solution because of its good trade-off between load balance and packet reordering. However we find its one significant limitation: it makes the forwarding paths of flows unpredictable. To address this limitation this paper presents BurstBalancer a simple yet efficient load balancing system with a sketch named BalanceSketch. Our design philosophy isdoing less changesto keep the forwarding path of most flows fixed which guides the design of BalanceSketch and our balance operations. We have fully implemented BurstBalancer in a small-scale testbed built with Tofino switches and conducted both large-scale event-level (NS-2) and ESL (electronic system level) simulations. Our results show that BurstBalancer achieves 5%$\sim$35% smaller FCT than LetFlow in symmetric topology and up to 30× smaller FCT in asymmetric topology while 58× fewer flows suffer from path changing. All related codes are open-sourced at GitHub