CAPTON - Centralized All-Path Transmission for Over-Subscribed Datacenter Networks

Nan Zhou, Jack Y. B. Lee

Abstract: This work addresses an often-overlooked challenge in designing datacenter traffic control schemes. Specifically, most existing schemes were designed for network topologies with non-blocking network core. While this enabled the development of elegant solutions, core networks in practice are more likely to be over-subscribed by the access layer network due to cost considerations. Consequently, existing traffic control schemes may perform sub-optimally in real-world over-subscribed datacenter networks. This work proposes a new centralized flow-based scheduling scheme called CAPTON which schedules flow according to remaining flow size and link capacities to avoid congestion in over-subscribed networks. CAPTON employs all-path transmission to exploit all available paths and redundant links between source and destination hosts to maximize resource utilization and eliminate the need for routing. Unlike switch-based approaches, CAPTON does not require additional support from network switches and thus can be readily deployed in current datacenters equipped with commodity switches.