FloMore: Meeting bandwidth requirements of flows

TL;DR

FloMore is a traffic engineering scheme that optimizes bandwidth allocation for individual services in wide-area networks, improving resource utilization and meeting service requirements more effectively than existing methods.

Contribution

FloMore introduces a novel approach that considers service-specific failure states and allocates traffic accordingly, enhancing bandwidth guarantees in cloud provider networks.

Findings

FloMore outperforms SMORE and Teavar in bandwidth provisioning.

The decomposition scheme enables scalability to larger networks.

FloMore achieves higher service availability under failures.

Abstract

Wide-area cloud provider networks must support the bandwidth requirements of diverse services (e.g., applications, product groups, customers) despite failures. Existing traffic engineering (TE) schemes operate at much coarser granularity than services, which we show necessitates unduly conservative decisions. To tackle this, we present FloMore, which directly considers the bandwidth needs of individual services and ensures they are met a desired percentage of time. Rather than meet the requirements for all services over the same set of failure states, FloMore exploits a key opportunity that each service could meet its bandwidth requirements over a different set of failure states. FloMore consists of an offline phase that identifies the critical failure states of each service, and on failure allocates traffic in a manner that prioritizes those services for which that failure state is critical. We present a novel decomposition scheme to handle FloMore's offline phase in a tractable manner. Our evaluations show that FloMore outperforms state-of-the-art TE schemes including SMORE and Teavar, and also out-performs extensions of these schemes that we devise. The results also show FloMore's decomposition approach allows it to scale well to larger network topologies.