AggreFlow: Achieving Power Efficiency, Load Balancing, and Quality of Service in Data Center Networks

Zehua Guo, Yang Xu, Ya Feng Liu, Sen Liu, H. Jonathan Chao, Zhi Li Zhang, Yuanqing Xia

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

Power-efficient Data Center Networks (DCNs) have been proposed to save power of DCNs using OpenFlow. In these DCNs, the OpenFlow controller adaptively turns on/off links and OpenFlow switches to form a minimum-power subnet that satisfies the traffic demand. As the subnet changes, flows are dynamically routed and rerouted to the routes composed of active switches and links. However, existing flow scheduling schemes could cause undesired results: (1) power inefficiency: due to unbalanced traffic allocation on active routes, extra switches and links may be activated to cater to bursty traffic surges on congested routes, and (2) Quality of Service (QoS) fluctuation: because of the limited flow entry processing ability, switches may not be able to timely install/delete/update flow entries to properly route/reroute flows. In this paper, we propose AggreFlow, a dynamic flow scheduling scheme that achieves power efficiency and QoS improvement using three techniques: Flow-set Routing, Lazy Rerouting, and Adaptive Rerouting. Flow-set Routing achieves load balancing with a small number of flow entry operations by routing flows in a coarse-grained flow-set fashion. Lazy Rerouting spreads rerouting operations over a relatively long period of time, reducing the burstiness of entry operation on switches. Adaptive Rerouting selectively reroutes flow-sets to maintain load balancing. We built an NS3 based fat-tree network simulation platform to evaluate AggreFlow's performance. The simulation results show that AggreFlow reduces power consumption by about 18%, yet achieving load balancing and improved QoS (low packet loss rate and reducing the number of processing entries for flow scheduling by 98%), compared with baseline schemes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number9253693
Pages (from-to)17-33
Number of pages17
JournalIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Volume29
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 1993-2012 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Flow scheduling
  • OpenFlow
  • power saving
  • power-efficient data center networks

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