Layer-3 multipathing in commodity-based data center networks

Improving availability and throughput is a significant challenge for data center networks. Recent studies have attempted to use a variety of routing and multipathing techniques. However, no method has yet managed to combine availability and throughput improvement with actual deployability, usually because of dedicated hardware requirements. In this study, we focus on commodity-based layer-3 data center networks. We propose a method for layer-3 multipathing via the novel usage of common IP encapsulation techniques for throughput improvement. Our approach requires minimal software modifications at end hosts. The method enables us to construct an efficient data center network using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) switches. In this paper, we describe the approach and an evaluation, in which our approach achieves an above-85% forwarding rate in general, and 100% for an experimental traffic pattern.