PLB: Adaptive Partial Congestion-aware Load Balancing for Datacenter Networks

In order to accommodate ever-increasing new tenants and applications, datacenter networks (DCNs) require an efficient load balancing scheme to fully utilize their bisection bandwidth. Equal-cost MultiPath routing (ECMP) is a widely used load-balancing mechanism in the DCN. However, ECMP blindly hashes traffic to parallel paths and results in imbalance and collisions. Motivated by ECMP's shortcomings, some recent schemes provide more visibility into networks via active probing. They could be broadly classified as probing all the paths or a fixed number of paths (e.g., 3 paths) each probe interval. However, they all suffer from some limitations. Probing all paths introduces high probing overhead while probing a fixed number of paths is suboptimal when the network topology and traffic load change. To our best knowledge, none of the existing schemes adapt the number of paths being probed to the network conditions. Enlightened by the defects of previous work, we introduce PLB, an adaptive partial congestion-aware load-balancing mechanism. At its heart, PLB randomly probes partial paths each probe interval and the number of them changes according to the network topology and the traffic load. Besides, PLB splits flow into flowlets and makes careful routing/rerouting decisions for them. Through analysis, we formulate the correlations between the number of paths being probed and the network conditions. Furthermore, simulations with realistic workloads validate our conclusions and show that PLB reduces overall flow completion times compared to the state-of-the-art load balancing schemes both in symmetric and asymmetric topologies.