Streamlined Pathway (SP) Approach: An Efficient Load Balancer to Enhance Quality of Service

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Streamlined Pathway (SP) model, an SDN-based load balancing approach that improves QoS in data center networks by using minimal data, outperforming existing methods in key performance metrics.

Contribution

It presents a novel load balancing model that requires less statistical data and outperforms existing techniques in QoS metrics within data center networks.

Findings

SP improves bisection bandwidth and link utilization.

SP reduces packet loss and latency.

SP outperforms Sieve, Hedera, and ECMP in experiments.

Abstract

Efficient load-balancing mechanisms are critical for maximizing performance and increasing the quality of service (QoS) of data center networks (DCNs). Obtaining the optimal QoS while minimizing resource consumption remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes the streamlined pathway (SP) model, which is a flow scheduling solution that requires minimal statistical knowledge of the DCN data plane. The SP model utilizes the software-defined networks (SDN) paradigm with less information gathered from the DCN data plane, besides the traditional hash-based flow scheduling mechanism, the Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP). In SDN, the proposed methodology harnesses a minimal yet powerful set of statistical data extracted from the DCN data plane, including port throughput and elephant flow information on the aggregate switches of the DCN fat-tree topology. Several experiments, in addition to theoretical analysis, have been conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed SP model in terms of QoS enhancement. These results confirm that SP outperforms leading techniques such as Sieve, Hedera, and ECMP, concerning bisection bandwidth, DCN link utilization, packet loss, and packet delivery latency.