Boosting Ethernet Performance by Segment-Based Routing

Ethernet is turning out to be a cost-effective solution for building cluster networks offering compatibility, simplicity, high bandwidth, scalability and a good performance-to-cost ratio. Nevertheless, Ethernet still makes inefficient use of network resources (links) and suffers from long failure recovery time due to the lack of a suitable routing algorithm. In this paper we embed an efficient routing algorithm into 802.3 Ethernet technology, making it possible to use off-the-shelf equipment to build high-performance and cost-effective Ethernet clusters, with an efficient use of link bandwidth and with fault tolerant capabilities. The algorithm, referred to as segment-based routing (SR), is a deterministic routing algorithm that achieves high performance without the need for virtual channels (not available in Ethernet). Moreover, SR is topology agnostic, meaning it can be applied to any topology, and tolerates any combination of faults derived from the original topology when combined with static reconfiguration. Through simulations we verify an overall improvement in throughput by a factor of 1.2 to 10.0 when compared to the conventional Ethernet routing algorithm, the spanning tree protocol (STP), and other topology agnostic routing algorithms such as Up*/Down* and tree-based turn-prohibition, the last one being recently proposed for Ethernet