QuLa: Queue and latency-aware service selection and routing in service-centric networking

Due to an explosive growth in services running in different datacenters, there is need for service selection and routing to deliver user requests to the best service instance. In current solutions, it is generally the client that must first select a datacenter to forward the request to before an internal load-balancer of the selected datacenter can select the optimal instance. An optimal selection requires knowledge of both network and server characteristics, making clients less suitable to make this decision. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) research solved a similar selection problem for static data retrieval by integrating content delivery as a native network feature. We address the selection problem for services by extending the ICN-principles for services. In this paper we present Queue and Latency, a network-driven service selection algorithm which maps user demand to service instances, taking into account both network and server metrics. To reduce the size of service router forwarding tables, we present a statistical method to approximate an optimal load distribution with minimized router state required. Simulation results show that our statistical routing approach approximates the average system response time of source-based routing with minimized state in forwarding tables.