MTSS: Multi-path traffic scheduling mechanism based on SDN

Large-scale and diverse businesses based on the cloud computing platform bring the heavy network traffic to cloud data centers. However, the unbalanced workload of cloud data center network easily leads to the network congestion, the low resource utilization rate, the long delay, the low reliability, and the low throughput. In order to improve the utilization efficiency and the quality of services (QoS) of cloud system, especially to solve the problem of network congestion, we propose MTSS, a multi-path traffic scheduling mechanism based on software defined networking (SDN). MTSS utilizes the data flow scheduling flexibility of SDN and the multi-path feature of the fat-tree structure to improve the traffic balance of the cloud data center network. A heuristic traffic balancing algorithm is presented for MTSS, which periodically monitors the network link and dynamically adjusts the traffic on the heavy link to achieve programmable data forwarding and load balancing. The experimental results show that MTSS outperforms equal-cost multi-path protocol (ECMP), by effectively reducing the packet loss rate and delay. In addition, MTSS improves the utilization efficiency, the reliability and the throughput rate of the cloud data center network.