Analyzing Packet-Level Routing in Data Centers

Data centers host diverse applications with stringent QoS requirements. The key issue is to eliminate network congestions which severely degrade application performance. One effective solution is to balance the traffic load in the datacenter regular topologies. Many previous strategies focused on optimized flow routing, and these solutions can hardly achieve ideal load balance while guaranteeing QoS of different traffic flows due to the limitations in practical. In this paper, we discuss packet-level routing and analyze its merit for fine-grained load balance in data centers. Though packet-level routing interacts poorly with TCP in traditional network settings, we prove that it can be adapted to datacenter environment. Motived by the work done by Dixit [4] [5], we assert that packet-level routing is the right choice for data centers. Our simulation results demonstrate that packet-level routing better fulfills datacenter requirements.