A Novel Parallel Traffic Control Mechanism for Cloud Computing

In this paper a novel parallel network traffic control mechanism for cloud computing is proposed based on the packet scheduler HTB (Hierarchical Token Buckets). The idea of bandwidth borrowing in HTB makes it suitable for large scale high-performance scenario such as cloud computing. However, the capacity of current HTB is only 0.5 Gbps, which could not afford the high traffic rate and user concurrency in the cloud. In this paper, a parallel HTB mechanism is proposed: new algorithms are designed to reduce concurrency in HTB key structure access. Then, the usage of lock-free FIFOs parallelizes HTB into a 2-stage pipeline on the multi-core architecture. This parallel HTB could not only increase the processing rate, but also keep a well performance on stability, which is important for cloud computing. The simulation results prove that parallel HTB's capacity can easily break 1 Gbps, and reach 2 Gbps at most, increasing the performance as high as 300% compared to the traditional HTB. This makes it an effective network traffic control mechanism for cloud computing. Moreover, our work is the first one to make HTB run in the pipelined fashion on a multi-core processor.