Multi-Channel Scatter (MCS): Traffic balancing based on edge-switching in datacenter networks

There are many traffic balancing solutions for datacenter networks. All of them require network fabric or/and end user modifications. In this paper, we propose Multi-Channel Scatter (MCS), a new traffic balancing solution in datacenter networks. MCS works in the edge-switching layer (e.g. virtual switches in hypervisors) between the network fabric and end users. It can be deployed by the datacenter operators at a relatively low cost. MCS scatters packets in one TCP flow to several different forwarding paths (channels) to balance traffic. It can filter duplicated ACKs triggered by packet out-of-order, and uses congestion detection with ECN to update the weight of different paths and avoid packet loss. MCS processes packets in a switching-based mechanism and introduces acceptable overhead. Our simulation results demonstrate that its performance is much better than ECMP and close to MPTCP.