Optimizing Traffic in Public-Facing Data Centers Amid Internet Protocols

Sen Lin, Jianfeng Wang, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic

Abstract: Rapid development has been witnessed in optimizing the performance of data centers over the past decade. However, such advances thriving in private data centers are rarely deployed in public-facing data centers. A major challenge is synchronizing optimization signals—such as flow sizes, server assignments, and load information—with the traffic they are intended to optimize, especially across networks controlled by different entities. In this paper, we propose CloudCookie, a versatile signal carrier within Internet protocols that ensures bidirectional signal presence without client-side cooperation. To exemplify CloudCookie's benefits on public-facing data center traffic, we design a set of easy-to-deploy data center infrastructures, including load balancers and switches, to leverage application layer awareness and enable efficient flow packet scheduling and load balancing. Our evaluation shows that these advances synergistically optimize the 99th percentile of flow completion time by up to 20 x for the majority of flows.