ORSM: Online Routing and Scheduling Mechanism for Mix-flows in Data Center Networks

Nowadays, diverse cloud services generate a mix of deadline and non-deadline data flows that constitute the mix-flow environment in data center networks. Deadline flows are mainly generated by user-interactive services and must be completed within deadlines, while non-deadline flows are usually produced by data-parallel services and desire a shorter completion time. To satisfy their performance requirements simultaneously, most existing mix-flow scheduling algorithms are dedicated to balancing the resource contention between these two types of flows. However, routing should also be considered in conjunction with scheduling because inappropriate routing tends to prevent scheduling from playing a valid role. In this paper, we propose ORSM, an online routing and scheduling mechanism for mix-flow transport. We formalize the mix-flow routing and scheduling problem as a mixed integer programming problem. ORSM then solves this problem in a distributed manner by leveraging the intrinsic feedback mechanism to determine the path and transmission rate for each flow. Extensive simulation results show that ORSM can effectively reduce the deadline miss ratio of deadline flows by up to 35.7% as well as the average flow completion time of non-deadline flows by up to 38.6% compared to state-of-art mechanisms.