FDALB: Flow distribution aware load balancing for datacenter networks

Abstract

We present FDALB, a flow distribution aware load balancing mechanism aimed at reducing flow collisions and achieving high scalability. FDALB, like the most of centralized methods, uses a centralized controller to get the view of networks and congestion information. However, FDALB classifies flows into short flows and long flows. The paths of short flows and long flows are controlled by distributed switches and the centralized controller respectively. Thus, the controller handles only a small part of flows to achieve high scalability. To further reduce the controller's overhead, FDALB leverages end-hosts to tag long flows, thus switches can easily determine long flows by inspecting the tag. Besides, FDALB can adaptively adjust the threshold at each end-host to keep up with the flow distribution dynamics.