On efficient bandwidth allocation for traffic variability in datacenters

Datacenter networks suffer unpredictable performance due to a lack of application level bandwidth guarantees. A lot of attentions have been drawn to solve this problem such as how to provide bandwidth guarantees for Virtualized Machines (VMs), proportional bandwidth share among tenants, and high network utilization under peak traffic. However, existing solutions fail to cope with highly dynamic traffic in datacenter networks. In this paper, we consider the effects of large numbers of short flows and massive bursty traffic in the datacenter, and design a novel distributed rate allocation algorithm based on the Logistic model under the control-theoretic framework. The theoretical analysis and experimental results using OpenFlow show that our algorithm not only guarantees the bandwidth for VMs, but also provides fast convergence to efficiency and fairness, and smooth response to bursty traffic.