All-Path Routing Protocols: Analysis of Scalability and Load Balancing Capabilities for Ethernet Networks

This paper presents a scalability and load balancing study of the All-Path protocols, a family of distributed switching protocols based on path exploration. ARP-Path is the main protocol and it explores every possible path reaching from source to destination by using ARP messages, selecting the lowest latency path. Flow-Path and Bridge-Path are respectively the flow-based and bridge-based versions, instead of the source address-based approach of ARP-Path. While preserving the main advantages of ARP-Path, Flow-Path has the advantages of full independence of flows for path creation, guaranteeing path symmetry and increased path diversity. While Bridge-Path increases scalability by reducing forwarding table entries at core bridges. We compare the characteristics of each protocol and the convenience of using each one depending on the topology and the type of traffic. Finally, we prove their load balancing capabilities analytically and via simulation.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure

Site-to-Site Internet Traffic Control

Queues allow network operators to control traffic: where queues build, they can enforce scheduling and shaping policies. In the Internet today, however, there is a mismatch between where queues build and where control is most effectively enforced; queues build at bottleneck links that are often not under the control of the data sender. To resolve this mismatch, we propose a new kind of middlebox, called Bundler. Bundler uses a novel inner control loop between a sendbox (in the sender's site) and a receivebox (in the receiver's site) to determine the aggregate rate for the bundle, leaving the end-to-end connections and their control loops intact. Enforcing this sending rate ensures that bottleneck queues that would have built up from the bundle's packets now shift from the bottleneck to the sendbox. The sendbox then exercises control over its traffic by scheduling packets to achieve higher-level objectives. We have implemented Bundler in Linux and evaluated it with real-world and emulation experiments. We find that it improves median flow completion time by between 28% and 97% across various scenarios.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figure