Parallel prioritized flow scheduling for software defined data center network

Prioritized flow scheduling is essential for providing QoS differentiation and energy saving in data center network. While dynamically manipulating the routing paths of incoming flows becomes practical via enabling technology of software-defined network (SDN), scheduling a large amount of flows in real time remains challenging. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Parallel Grouping Algorithm (IPGA) to the prioritized flow-scheduling problem. Thanks to the inherent nature of parallelism, the IPGA-based flow scheduler not only performs fast scheduling but also can be efficiently realized by a CUDA system within the SDN controller. Via simulations, we demonstrate that the IPGA scheduler achieves QoS differentiation and promising energy saving for a Fat-tree-based network.