In current Data Center Networks (DCNs), Equal- Cost MultiPath (ECMP) is used as the de-facto routing protocol. However, ECMP does not differentiate between short and long flows, the two main categories of flows depending on their duration (lifetime). This issue causes hot-spots in the network, affecting negatively the Flow Completion Time (FCT) and the throughput, the two key performance metrics in data center networks. Previous work on load balancing proposed solutions such as splitting long flows into short flows, using per-packet forwarding approaches, and isolating the paths of short and long flows. We propose DiffFlow, a new load balancing solution which detects long flows and forwards packets using Random Packet Spraying (RPS) with help of SDN, whereas the flows with small duration are forwarded with ECMP by default. The use of ECMP for short flows is reasonable, as it does not create the out-of-order problem; at the same time, RPS for long flows can efficiently help to load balancing the entire network, given that long flows represent most of the traffic in DCNs. The results show that our DiffFlow solution outperforms both the individual usage of either RPS or ECMP, while the overall throughput achieved is maintained at the level comparable to RPS.
One of the first solutions proposed to address the long flow problem was Hedera @cite_5 . Proposed was the use of a centralized flow scheduling, using OpenFlow switches, to relocate long flows for load balancing. Because of the use of central controller, the algorithm takes some time for the reallocation of flows which was shown to make Hedera slow reacting dynamically to changes in traffic patterns.
@cite_5
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Datacenter networks provide high path diversity for traffic between machines. Load balancing traffic across these paths is important for both, latency- and throughput-sensitive applications. The standard load balancing techniques used today obliviously hash a flow to a random path. When long flows collide on the same path, this might lead to long lasting congestion while other paths could be underutilized, degrading performance of other flows as well. Recent proposals to address this shortcoming incur significant implementation complexity at the host that would actually slow down short flows (MPTCP), depend on relatively slow centralized controllers for rerouting large congesting flows (Hedera), or require custom switch hardware, hindering near-term deployment (DeTail). We propose FlowBender, a novel technique that: (1) Load balances distributively at the granularity of flows instead of packets, avoiding excessive packet reordering. (2) Uses end-host-driven rehashing to trigger dynamic flow-to-path assignment. (3) Recovers from link failures within a Retransmit Timeout (RTO). (4) Amounts to less than 50 lines of critical kernel code and is readily deployable in commodity data centers today. (5) Is very robust and simple to tune. We evaluate FlowBender using both simulations and a real testbed implementation, and show that it improves average and tail latencies significantly compared to state of the art techniques without incurring the significant overhead and complexity of other load balancing schemes. Many existing data center network (DCN) flow scheduling schemes minimize flow completion times (FCT) based on prior knowledge of flows and custom switch designs, making them hard to use in practice. This paper introduces, Pias, a practical flow scheduling approach that minimizes FCT with no prior knowledge using commodity switches. At its heart, Pias leverages multiple priority queues available in commodity switches to implement a Multiple Level Feedback Queue (MLFQ), in which a PIAS flow gradually demotes from higher-priority queues to lower-priority queues based on the bytes it has sent. In this way, short flows are prioritized over long flows, which enables Pias to emulate Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduling without knowing the flow sizes beforehand. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Pias significantly outperforms all existing information-agnostic solutions. It improves average FCT for short flows by up to 50 and 40 over DCTCP [3] and L2DCT [16]. Compared to an ideal information-aware DCN transport, p-Fabric [5], it only shows 4.9 performance degradation for short flows in a production datacenter workload. This paper addresses a large-scale power plant maintenance scheduling and production planning problem, which has been proposed by the ROADEF EURO Challenge 2010. We develop two lower bounds for the problem: a greedy heuristic and a flow network for which a minimum cost flow problem has to be solved. Furthermore, we present a solution approach that combines a constraint programming formulation of the problem with several heuristics. The problem is decomposed into an outage scheduling and a production planning phase. The first phase is solved by a constraint program, which additionally ensures the feasibility of the remaining problem. In the second phase we utilize a greedy heuristic--developed from our greedy lower bound--to assign production levels and refueling amounts for a given outage schedule. All proposed strategies are shown to be competitive in an experimental evaluation. In order to achieve dynamic load balancing based on data fl ow level, in this paper, we apply SDN technology to the cloud data center, and propose a dynamic load balancing method of cloud center based on SDN. The approach of using the SDN technology in the current task scheduling flexibility, accomplish real-time monitoring of the service node flow and load condition by the Open Flow protocol. When the load of system is imbalanced, the controller can allocate globally network resources. What’s more, by using dynamic correction, the load of the system is not obvious tilt in the long run. The results of simulation show that this approach can realize and ensure that the load will not tilt over a long period of time, and improve the system throughput.