Abstract
Contemporary datacenter networks are typically organized with multi-rooted tree topologies. To fully utilize the multiple end-to-end paths, effective mechanisms are required to balance traffic across them. However, existing load balancers for datacenters either operate at a coarse granularity, or support little for network failures, or necessitate customized hardware. We propose Distancer, a host-based distributed adaptive load balancer for datacenter traffic, which requires no coordination and modification of switches. Based on a deep investigation of TCP feedback mechanism, we firstly design Congestion Detector (C-Detector), which exploits ACKs to effectively handle network hot-spots and path anomalies in real time; Then we develop Load-Balancer (L-Balancer) to select best paths for both data packets and ACKs. According to our extensive evaluations, Distancer can achieve up to 40% and 20% better average flow completion times (AFCTs) than ECMP and CONGA respectively. Under the presence of path failures, Distancer improves the AFCT up to 400% and 30% over ECMP and CONGA.
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- 1.
In the TCP implementation of Linux kernel, the function tcp_output always sends out a whole congestion window at once.
- 2.
Here we mean pure ACKs. The piggybacking ACKs are viewed as data packets by Distancer.
- 3.
We moderately modify the MPTCP implementation on ns2 [1] to support our evaluation. We establish four subflows for every MPTCP connection in our experiments.
- 4.
A multi-rooted tree topology that only comprises the edge switch layer and core switch layer.
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Wang, S., Li, X., Qian, Z., Yuan, J. (2018). Distancer: A Host-Based Distributed Adaptive Load Balancer for Datacenter Traffic. In: Vaidya, J., Li, J. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11335. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05054-2_43
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