An SDN-based Hybrid Strategy for Load Balancing in Data Center Networks

Abstract

th for various services. Yet today’s widely used load balancing scheme, i.e., ECMP, may cause serious congestion when hash collision happens. Recent proposals either push load balancing function to a centralized controller or network edges. However, the centralized schemes are too slow for latency-sensitive flows, while the distributed schemes lack the global view and usually cannot make the best choices. In this paper, based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), we present a new hybrid load balancing scheme called BLEND. It promotes the cooperation among network components and takes advantage of both global view and fast end-host action. BLEND aims to improve the throughput of big flows and reduce the latency of small and medium flows. It employs a controller to assign paths to big flows to achieve high throughput. In addition, in order to provide guidance for fast distributed load balancing decisions, the controller also calculates the optimal network delay thresholds for small and medium flows, while hosts utilize these thresholds to decide whether to change the current paths. BLEND is practical and easily deployable in the current data center networks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that BLEND outperforms both the centralized and distributed schemes and achieves at most 40% reduction in FCT and at most 2.8 times improvement in throughput.