Longer Is Better: Exploiting Path Diversity in Data Center Networks

Data Center (DC) networks exhibit much more centralized characteristics than the legacy Internet, yet they are operated by similar distributed routing and control algorithms that fail to exploit topological redundancy to deliver better and more sustainable performance. Multipath protocols, for example, use node-local and heuristic information to only exploit path diversity between shortest paths. In this paper, we use a measurement-based approach to schedule flows over both shortest and non-shortest paths based on temporal network-wide utilization. We present the Baatdaat flow scheduling algorithm which uses spare DC network capacity to mitigate the performance degradation of heavily utilized links. Results show that Baatdaat achieves close to optimal Traffic Engineering by reducing network-wide maximum link utilization by up to 18% over Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routing, while at the same time improving flow completion time by 41% - 95%.