A layer 2 multipath solution and its performance evaluation for Data Center Ethernets

Data Center Ethernet is likely to be deployed as the communication infrastructure for future data centers, which carries multiple types of traffic with very different characteristics and handling requirements. Conventional Spanning Tree Protocol STP cannot meet the requirement of a Data Center Ethernet framework because of its poor bandwidth utilization and lack of multipathing capability. In this paper, we propose a layer2 multipathing solution, namely optimized dynamic load-balancing multipathing ODLBMP, to be deployed in Data Center Ethernet. Our proposed method utilizes all available links and ports for frame delivery and can split traffic of a communication pair along multiple paths. In ODLBMP, the traffic loads of all paths are continuously monitored so that traffic assigned to each path can be dynamically adjusted to avoid path/link over-utilization. Per-flow forwarding is observed in ODLBMP to guarantee the in-order delivery, which is important for most storage traffic. In addition, ODLBMP finely differentiates flows from application perspective so it has more flexibility in traffic splitting and route selection, and achieves better multipath load balancing. Computer simulations show that our proposed algorithm performs better than other compared algorithms, including STP, Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links, and DLBMP, in all simulation scenarios in terms of frame delivery ratio and network throughput. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.