FlowFurl: A flow-level routing for faulty data center networks

Recent Data center network topologies put forward multiple paths between the end hosts to provide high bisection bandwidth. For the sake of efficient utilization of multiple paths many load balancing techniques are proposed in the literature. These load balancing proposals mainly deal with distribution of traffic among multiple paths. While balancing the traffic among multiple paths, few proposals also take care of congestion. Flow level solutions avoid flow splitting to preventing the packet reordering at the destination. These solutions try for rerouting (change the path) of flow dynamically based on the feedback received from the network. In case of link failures rerouting of the flow, based on the queue size of the remote switch alone may be sub-optimal. This paper proposes FlowFurl, an adaptive, distributed, end host driven and flow level load balancing technique. This adaptive routing technique supports dynamic flow-to-path assignment. This flow-to-path assignment is not only based on the congestion at the switch, but also the status of the links along the path. The simulation results show that utilizing connectivity information with congestion information can help to design better load balancing scheme.