3,557 research outputs found
Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs
Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute
and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical
datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network
and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety
of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it
deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently.
Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities
and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic
with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport
protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve
datacenter network performance.
In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter
networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties,
general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control
objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important
characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all
existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of
existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and
factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss
various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management
schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing,
multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges
as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper,
we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically
dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently
and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Global state, local decisions: Decentralized NFV for ISPs via enhanced SDN
The network functions virtualization paradigm is rapidly gaining interest among Internet service providers. However, the transition to this paradigm on ISP networks comes with a unique set of challenges: legacy equipment already in place, heterogeneous traffic from multiple clients, and very large scalability requirements. In this article we thoroughly analyze such challenges and discuss NFV design guidelines that address them efficiently. Particularly, we show that a decentralization of NFV control while maintaining global state improves scalability, offers better per-flow decisions and simplifies the implementation of virtual network functions. Building on top of such principles, we propose a partially decentralized NFV architecture enabled via an enhanced software-defined networking infrastructure. We also perform a qualitative analysis of the architecture to identify advantages and challenges. Finally, we determine the bottleneck component, based on the qualitative analysis, which we implement and benchmark in order to assess the feasibility of the architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
QuickCast: Fast and Efficient Inter-Datacenter Transfers using Forwarding Tree Cohorts
Large inter-datacenter transfers are crucial for cloud service efficiency and
are increasingly used by organizations that have dedicated wide area networks
between datacenters. A recent work uses multicast forwarding trees to reduce
the bandwidth needs and improve completion times of point-to-multipoint
transfers. Using a single forwarding tree per transfer, however, leads to poor
performance because the slowest receiver dictates the completion time for all
receivers. Using multiple forwarding trees per transfer alleviates this
concern--the average receiver could finish early; however, if done naively,
bandwidth usage would also increase and it is apriori unclear how best to
partition receivers, how to construct the multiple trees and how to determine
the rate and schedule of flows on these trees. This paper presents QuickCast, a
first solution to these problems. Using simulations on real-world network
topologies, we see that QuickCast can speed up the average receiver's
completion time by as much as while only using more
bandwidth; further, the completion time for all receivers also improves by as
much as faster at high loads.Comment: [Extended Version] Accepted for presentation in IEEE INFOCOM 2018,
Honolulu, H
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