Flow-slice: a novel load-balancing scheme for multi-path switching systems

Abstract

Multi-Path Switching systems (MPS) are intensively used in the state-of-the-art core routers. One of the most intractable issues is how to load-balance traffic across its multiple paths while not disturbing the intra-flow packet orders. In this paper, based on the studies of tens of real Internet traces, we develop a novel scheme, namely Flow-Slice (FS), which cuts off each flow into flow-slices at every intra-flow interval larger than a slicing threshold set to 1ms 4ms and balances the load on the finer granularity. Through theoretical analyses and comprehensive trace-driven simulations, we show that FS achieves impressive load-balancing performance with little hardware cost while limiting the packet out-of-order chances to a negligible level (below 10 -6).