No Arabic abstract
Several organizations have built multiple datacenters connected via dedicated wide area networks over which large inter-datacenter transfers take place. This includes tremendous volumes of bulk multicast traffic generated as a result of data and content replication. Although one can perform these transfers using a single multicast forwarding tree, that can lead to poor performance as the slowest receiver on each tree dictates the completion time for all receivers. Using multiple trees per transfer each connected to a subset of receivers alleviates this concern. The choice of multicast trees also determines the total bandwidth usage. To further improve the performance, bandwidth over dedicated inter-datacenter networks can be carved for different multicast trees over specific time periods to avoid congestion and minimize the average receiver completion times. In this paper, we break this problem into the three sub-problems of partitioning, tree selection, and rate allocation. We present an algorithm called QuickCast which is computationally fast and allows us to significantly speed up multiple receivers per bulk multicast transfer with control over extra bandwidth consumption. We evaluate QuickCast against a variety of synthetic and real traffic patterns as well as real WAN topologies. Compared to performing bulk multicast transfers as separate unicast transfers, QuickCast achieves up to $3.64times$ reduction in mean completion times while at the same time using $0.71times$ the bandwidth. Also, QuickCast allows the top $50%$ of receivers to complete between $3times$ to $35times$ faster on average compared with when a single forwarding multicast tree is used for data delivery.
Flow routing over inter-datacenter networks is a well-known problem where the network assigns a path to a newly arriving flow potentially according to the network conditions and the properties of the new flow. An essential system-wide performance metric for a routing algorithm is the flow completion times, which affect the performance of applications running across multiple datacenters. Current static and dynamic routing approaches do not take advantage of flow size information in routing, which is practical in a controlled environment such as inter-datacenter networks that are managed by the datacenter operators. In this paper, we discuss Best Worst-case Routing (BWR), which aims at optimizing the tail completion times of long-running flows over inter-datacenter networks with non-uniform link capacities. Since finding the path with the best worst-case completion time for a new flow is NP-Hard, we investigate two heuristics, BWRH and BWRHF, which use two different upper bounds on the worst-case completion times for routing. We evaluate BWRH and BWRHF against several real WAN topologies and multiple traffic patterns. Although BWRH better models the BWR problem, BWRH and BWRHF show negligible difference across various system-wide performance metrics, while BWRHF being significantly faster. Furthermore, we show that compared to other popular routing heuristics, BWRHF can reduce the mean and tail flow completion times by over $1.5times$ and $2times$, respectively.
Inter-datacenter networks connect dozens of geographically dispersed datacenters and carry traffic flows with highly variable sizes and different classes. Adaptive flow routing can improve efficiency and performance by assigning paths to new flows according to network status and flow properties. A popular approach widely used for traffic engineering is based on current bandwidth utilization of links. We propose an alternative that reduces bandwidth usage by up to at least 50% and flow completion times by up to at least 40% across various scheduling policies and flow size distributions.
Bulk transfers from one to multiple datacenters can have many different completion time objectives ranging from quickly replicating some $k$ copies to minimizing the time by which the last destination receives a full replica. We design an SDN-style wide-area traffic scheduler that optimizes different completion time objectives for various requests. The scheduler builds, for each bulk transfer, one or more multicast forwarding trees which preferentially use lightly loaded network links. Multiple multicast trees are used per bulk transfer to insulate destinations that have higher available bandwidth and can hence finish quickly from congested destinations. These decisions--how many trees to construct and which receivers to serve using a given tree--result from an optimization problem that minimizes a weighted sum of transfers completion time objectives and their bandwidth consumption. Results from simulations and emulations on Mininet show that our scheduler, Iris, can improve different completion time objectives by about $2.5times$.
Long flows contribute huge volumes of traffic over inter-datacenter WAN. The Flow Completion Time (FCT) is a vital network performance metric that affects the running time of distributed applications and the users quality of experience. Flow routing techniques based on propagation or queuing latency or instantaneous link utilization are insufficient for minimization of the long flows FCT. We propose a routing approach that uses the remaining sizes and paths of all ongoing flows to minimize the worst-case completion time of incoming flows assuming no knowledge of future flow arrivals. Our approach can be formulated as an NP-Hard graph optimization problem. We propose BWRH, a heuristic to quickly generate an approximate solution. We evaluate BWRH against several real WAN topologies and two different traffic patterns. We see that BWRH provides solutions with an average optimality gap of less than $0.25%$. Furthermore, we show that compared to other popular routing heuristics, BWRH reduces the mean and tail FCT by up to $1.46times$ and $1.53times$, respectively.
Datacenters provide the infrastructure for cloud computing services used by millions of users everyday. Many such services are distributed over multiple datacenters at geographically distant locations possibly in different continents. These datacenters are then connected through high speed WAN links over private or public networks. To perform data backups or data synchronization operations, many transfers take place over these networks that have to be completed before a deadline in order to provide necessary service guarantees to end users. Upon arrival of a transfer request, we would like the system to be able to decide whether such a request can be guaranteed successful delivery. If yes, it should provide us with transmission schedule in the shortest time possible. In addition, we would like to avoid packet reordering at the destination as it affects TCP performance. Previous work in this area either cannot guarantee that admitted transfers actually finish before the specified deadlines or use techniques that can result in packet reordering. In this paper, we propose DCRoute, a fast and efficient routing and traffic allocation technique that guarantees transfer completion before deadlines for admitted requests. It assigns each transfer a single path to avoid packet reordering. Through simulations, we show that DCRoute is at least 200 times faster than other traffic allocation techniques based on linear programming (LP) while admitting almost the same amount of traffic to the system.