HybridTE: Traffic Engineering for Very Low-Cost Software-Defined Data-Center Networks

TL;DR

HybridTE introduces a traffic engineering method for SDN-controlled data centers that leverages large flow information to achieve high performance with minimal hardware, enabling cost-effective network scalability.

Contribution

The paper presents HybridTE, a novel TE technique that reduces hardware requirements while maintaining superior performance by utilizing large flow information.

Findings

HybridTE outperforms existing TE methods in efficiency.

It requires fewer flow table entries and less flow installation rate.

Enables construction of low-cost, high-performance data-center networks.

Abstract

The size of modern data centers is constantly increasing. As it is not economic to interconnect all machines in the data center using a full-bisection-bandwidth network, techniques have to be developed to increase the efficiency of data-center networks. The Software-Defined Network paradigm opened the door for centralized traffic engineering (TE) in such environments. Up to now, there were already a number of TE proposals for SDN-controlled data centers that all work very well. However, these techniques either use a high amount of flow table entries or a high flow installation rate that overwhelms available switching hardware, or they require custom or very expensive end-of-line equipment to be usable in practice. We present HybridTE, a TE technique that uses (uncertain) information about large flows. Using this extra information, our technique has very low hardware requirements while maintaining better performance than existing TE techniques. This enables us to build very low-cost, high performance data-center networks.