Deterministic Bandwidth-Based Packet-Level Traffic Splitting for Datacenter Networks

Traffic splitting is to distribute traffic over multiple paths so as to better utilize link bandwidth and avoid potential link congestion. Many traffic splitting schemes have been proposed for datacenter networks, which provide different levels of splitting granularity. This paper proposes a packet-level traffic splitting scheme, which provides the most fine-grained link utilization as it lays out a forwarding path for each individual packet. The proposed scheme mitigates possible packet reordering problem by equalizing the build-ups of packet queues in all switches as the path layout utilizes links in proportional to the associated exploitable link bandwidth. The result is a packet dispatching rule designated to each switch. We implemented the rules using P4 (Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors) switches and conducted experiments to measure the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides higher goodput compared with another packet-level traffic splitting scheme which dispatches packets randomly among all links.