SRP: A routing protocol for data center networks

Abstract

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a broadly used routing protocol in today's data center networks. Though it can adaptively find alternative paths when link failure is detected, route recomputation in OSPF is CPU-intensive, and usually needs quite a long time to achieve routing convergence. Besides, the configuration in OSPF is rather complex. In this paper, we propose Sequoia Routing Protocol (SRP), a routing protocol with a dedicated shortest path calculation algorithm, designed for data center networks. By leveraging the observation that each data center has a fixed Clos topology, SRP largely simplifies routing configuration, and achieves light-weight computation. We show that SRP outperforms OSPF with a much faster convergence time by simulation in ns-3. We also implement SRP in real-world switches, showing that SRP is as efficient as OSPF even for a small-scale network where route recomputation of OSPF does not take a long time.