1,583 research outputs found
Endpoint-transparent Multipath Transport with Software-defined Networks
Multipath forwarding consists of using multiple paths simultaneously to
transport data over the network. While most such techniques require endpoint
modifications, we investigate how multipath forwarding can be done inside the
network, transparently to endpoint hosts. With such a network-centric approach,
packet reordering becomes a critical issue as it may cause critical performance
degradation.
We present a Software Defined Network architecture which automatically sets
up multipath forwarding, including solutions for reordering and performance
improvement, both at the sending side through multipath scheduling algorithms,
and the receiver side, by resequencing out-of-order packets in a dedicated
in-network buffer.
We implemented a prototype with commonly available technology and evaluated
it in both emulated and real networks. Our results show consistent throughput
improvements, thanks to the use of aggregated path capacity. We give
comparisons to Multipath TCP, where we show our approach can achieve a similar
performance while offering the advantage of endpoint transparency
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
Mitigating the impact of packet reordering to maximize performance of multimedia applications
We propose a solution to mitigate the performance degradation and corresponding Quality of Experience (QoE) reduction caused by packet reordering for multimedia applications which utilise unreliable transport protocols like the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). We analytically derive the optimum buffer size based on the applications data rate and the maximum delay tolerated by the multimedia application. We propose a dynamically adjustable buffer in the transport protocol receiver which uses this optimum buffer size. We demonstrate, via simulation results, that our solution reduces the packet loss rate, increases the perceived bandwidth and does not increase jitter in the received applications packets while still being within the application's delay limits, therefore resulting in an increased QoE of multimedia applications
Sprinklers: A Randomized Variable-Size Striping Approach to Reordering-Free Load-Balanced Switching
Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, calling for switches that
can scale well in both size and speed. While load-balanced switches can achieve
such scalability, they suffer from a fundamental packet reordering problem.
Existing proposals either suffer from poor worst-case packet delays or require
sophisticated matching mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new family of
stable load-balanced switches called "Sprinklers" that has comparable
implementation cost and performance as the baseline load-balanced switch, but
yet can guarantee packet ordering. The main idea is to force all packets within
the same virtual output queue (VOQ) to traverse the same "fat path" through the
switch, so that packet reordering cannot occur. At the core of Sprinklers are
two key innovations: a randomized way to determine the "fat path" for each VOQ,
and a way to determine its "fatness" roughly in proportion to the rate of the
VOQ. These innovations enable Sprinklers to achieve near-perfect load-balancing
under arbitrary admissible traffic. Proving this property rigorously using
novel worst-case large deviation techniques is another key contribution of this
work
Traffic Management Applications for Stateful SDN Data Plane
The successful OpenFlow approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows
network programmability through a central controller able to orchestrate a set
of dumb switches. However, the simple match/action abstraction of OpenFlow
switches constrains the evolution of the forwarding rules to be fully managed
by the controller. This can be particularly limiting for a number of
applications that are affected by the delay of the slow control path, like
traffic management applications. Some recent proposals are pushing toward an
evolution of the OpenFlow abstraction to enable the evolution of forwarding
policies directly in the data plane based on state machines and local events.
In this paper, we present two traffic management applications that exploit a
stateful data plane and their prototype implementation based on OpenState, an
OpenFlow evolution that we recently proposed.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure
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