DCRoute: Speeding up Inter-Datacenter Traffic Allocation while Guaranteeing Deadlines

TL;DR

DCRoute is a novel routing and traffic allocation method for inter-datacenter transfers that guarantees deadline completion, avoids packet reordering, and is significantly faster than existing LP-based techniques, with comparable traffic admission rates.

Contribution

This paper introduces DCRoute, a fast and efficient routing algorithm that guarantees transfer deadlines and prevents packet reordering in inter-datacenter networks.

Findings

DCRoute is at least 200 times faster than LP-based methods.

DCRoute admits nearly the same amount of traffic as existing techniques.

DCRoute guarantees transfer completion before deadlines and avoids packet reordering.

Abstract

Datacenters provide the infrastructure for cloud computing services used by millions of users everyday. Many such services are distributed over multiple datacenters at geographically distant locations possibly in different continents. These datacenters are then connected through high speed WAN links over private or public networks. To perform data backups or data synchronization operations, many transfers take place over these networks that have to be completed before a deadline in order to provide necessary service guarantees to end users. Upon arrival of a transfer request, we would like the system to be able to decide whether such a request can be guaranteed successful delivery. If yes, it should provide us with transmission schedule in the shortest time possible. In addition, we would like to avoid packet reordering at the destination as it affects TCP performance. Previous work in this area either cannot guarantee that admitted transfers actually finish before the specified deadlines or use techniques that can result in packet reordering. In this paper, we propose DCRoute, a fast and efficient routing and traffic allocation technique that guarantees transfer completion before deadlines for admitted requests. It assigns each transfer a single path to avoid packet reordering. Through simulations, we show that DCRoute is at least 200 times faster than other traffic allocation techniques based on linear programming (LP) while admitting almost the same amount of traffic to the system.