The Case for Fine-Grained Traffic Engineering in Data Centers
File(s)
Date
2009Author
Benson, Theophilus A
Akella, Aditya
Zhang, Ming
Publisher
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Computer Sciences
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Data center traffic characteristics are not well understood.
In particular, it is not clear how the prevalent
traffic patterns may impact candidate mechanisms for
managing traffic inside the data centers. In this paper,
we conduct a measurement study of network-level traffic
patterns inside data centers. Based on our empirical
insights, we design a traffic generator for creating representative
workloads for traffic between TOR switches in
a data center. We use this generator to evaluate several
traffic engineering techniques and data center network
architectures, and analyze their short comings. Our findings
highlight the need for fine-grained traffic engineering
(TE) mechanisms. We design and implement such an
approach using OpenFlow and show how it can significantly
improve data center TE.
Permanent Link
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/60694Citation
TR1666