Coding-Based Distributed Congestion-Aware Packet Spraying to Avoid Reordering in Data Center Networks

Modern Data Center Networks (DCNs) are commonly based on Clos topologies with a large number of equal-cost multiple paths to provide high bisection bandwidth. The existing Random Packet Spraying (RPS) scheme spreads each flow of packets to all available parallel paths in order to achieve good load balancing under symmetric topologies. However, under asymmetric topologies caused by traffic dynamics or link failures, RPS potentially suffers from serious out-of-order problem. Therefore, to avoid packet reordering, we propose a Coding-based Distributed Congestion-aware Packet Spraying mechanism called CDCPS. At the sender end, CDCPS encodes packets using forward error correction (FEC) technology and adaptively adjusts the coding redundancy according to the asymmetric degree of multiple equal-cost paths. To make full use of link bandwidth, CDCPS randomly spreads encoded packets to all available paths at the switches. The original packets can be recovered immediately once enough encoded packets from uncongested paths arrive at the receiver, even if some encoded packets are blocked on congested paths. The test results of NS2 simulation showed that CDCPS eliminates out-of-order packets completely and effectively reduces the average and $99^{th}$ flow completion time by up to 73% and 78% over the state-of-the-art load balancing scheme.