Boosting Ethernet Performance by Segment-Based Routing

Ethernet is turning out to be a cost-effective solution for building Cluster networks offering compatibility, simpli-city, high bandwidth, scalability and a good performance-to-cost ratio. Nevertheless, Ethernet still makes inefficient use of network resources (links) and suffers from long fail-ure recovery time due to the lack of a suitable routing algo-rithm. In this paper we embed an efficient routing algorithm into 802.3 Ethernet technology, making it possible to use off-the-shelf equipment to build high-performance and cost-effective Ethernet clusters, with an efficient use of link band-width and with fault tolerant capabilities. The algorithm, referred to as Segment-Based Routing (SR), is a determinis-tic routing algorithm that achieves high performance with-out the need for virtual channels (not available in Ether-net). Moreover, SR is topology agnostic, meaning it can be applied to any topology, and tolerates any combination of faults derived from the original topology when combined with static reconfiguration. Through simulations we ver-ify an overall improvement in throughput by a factor of 1.2 to 10.0 when compared to the conventional Ethernet rou-ting algorithm, the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), and other topology agnostic routing algorithms such as Up*/Down* and Tree-based Turn-prohibition, the last one being recently proposed for Ethernet.