Traffic Splitting over ECMPs using ACC Scheme

In order to reduce network congestion, when equal-cost-multi-paths (ECMPs) are between a forwarding node and a destination subnet, traffic should be balanced among ECMPs and packets of the same TCP flow should reach destination host in the same order. An algorithm called ARC-based caching with counting (ACC) is proposed. Packet length differentiation is considered to achieve load balance. UDP packets are only concerned to achieve load balance. Furthermore, flow access recency and frequency are considered when redirecting a flow to a new path. Simulation shows that when delay differentiation among ECMPs is not significant, storage requirement is small, only one cycle is needed for each cache lookup, load balance is near optimal, and only 1% of packets are out of order.