Load balancing with traffic isolation in data center networks

Abstract The topologies of current data center networks are typically multi-rooted trees (e.g. leaf-spine) with rich parallel paths between any pair of hosts. Recent progress has demonstrated that effective load balancing can fully utilize these parallel paths to speed up data transfer. Nonetheless, the existing load balancing designs are agnostic to the heterogeneous datacenter traffic, i.e., a mass of delay-sensitive short flows mix with a handful of throughput-oriented long flows, and casually reroute these flows regardless of path condition, thus resulting in frequent flow collisions. The short flows suffer from the problem of large queuing delay due to colliding with long flows, while the frequent collisions between long flows lead to low network utilization and serious throughput degradation. To address these inefficiencies, we propose an isolation-based load balancing scheme, namely ILB, which perceives flow collisions and dynamically isolates the long flows from short flows. Specifically, when a long flow collides with short flows in the same path, it immediately switches to another path unused by short flows to help the short ones in the previous path complete quickly. When short flows disappear, the long flow quickly occupies all its available paths to achieve high throughput. Moreover, ILB is only deployed on the leaf switch without modifying the end-host and spine switch. Experimental results of NS3 simulations show that ILB respectively reduces the average and tail flow completion time for short flows by up to 30% and 70%, as well as increases the throughput of long flows by about 1.68x over the state-of-the-art datacenter load balancing schemes.