RateSheriff: Multipath Flow-aware and Resource Efficient Rate Limiter Placement for Data Center Networks

Emerging cloud services and applications request different Quality of Service (QoS) in Data Center Networks (DCNs). To meet these various requirements, programmable switch-based rate limiters are introduced to provide performance isolation and benefit from easy control and fast deployment. However, existing programmable switch-based rate limiters have two limitations: (1) multipath flows (i.e., MultiPath TCP) cannot be precisely limited, and (2) rate limiter placement solutions in DCNs are missing. These limitations could lead to poor rate limiting performance and low bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we propose RateSheriff to improve rate limiting performance by providing multipath flow-aware and resource efficient rate limiter placement for programmable switch-enabled DCNs. We identify and associate subflows to a multipath flow by extracting and comparing specific packets and header fields. By solving the formulated resource efficient rate limiter placement problem, we can improve rate limiting performance and balance memory utilization among programmable switches in DCNs. Simulation results show that RateSheriff can correctly limit the rate of multipath flows, improve rate limiting performance by up to 46%, and improve memory balancing performance by up to 79% with low computation time, compared with baselines.