TCP-path: Improving load balance by network exploration

Bridging is widely used in Ethernet networks, but the spanning tree protocol blocks all redundant links to prevent loops, and therefore it cannot take advantage of multipath topologies to balance traffic load. Several multipath routing proposals use link-state protocols and Equal Cost Multi-Path rou...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in2017 IEEE 6th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet) pp. 1 - 6
Main Authors Alvarez-Horcajo, J., Lopez-Pajares, D., Arco, Jose M., Carral, J. Antonio, Martinez-Yelmo, I.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.09.2017
Subjects
ECMP
Load balance
Network topology
Path exploration
Ports (Computers)
Proposals
Protocols
Servers
Switches
TCP-Path
Topology
Online AccessGet full text
DOI10.1109/CloudNet.2017.8071533

Cover

More Information
Summary:Bridging is widely used in Ethernet networks, but the spanning tree protocol blocks all redundant links to prevent loops, and therefore it cannot take advantage of multipath topologies to balance traffic load. Several multipath routing proposals use link-state protocols and Equal Cost Multi-Path routing (ECMP) to distribute the load over multiple paths. However, these proposals are complex and prone to flow collisions that may degrade performance. This paper proposes the new TCP-Path protocol, which selects the fastest available path to a destination host on the fly when a new flow is established. TCP-Path is a new multilayer switching paradigm based on exploring all network paths triggered by TCP-SYN packets, instead of link-state based route computation. Here, we evaluate TCP-Path on ns-3 and Mininet and compare its performance. TCP-Path improves on ECMP by up to 25% in terms of throughput and up to 60% in terms of flow completion time. Thus, TCP-Path offers a better, yet simple alternative to ECMP-based solutions for multipath topologies.
DOI:10.1109/CloudNet.2017.8071533