A high-performance Two-Phase Multipath scheme for data-center networks

Multipath forwarding has been recently proposed to improve utilization in data centers by leveraging its redundant network design. However, most multipath proposals require significant modifications to the tenants’ network stack and therefore are only feasible in private clouds. In this paper, we propose a multipath packet-forwarding scheme for public clouds that does not require any modifications to the tenants’ network stack. Our Two-Phase Multipath (TPM) forwarding scheme is composed of a smart offline configuration phase that discover optimal disjoint paths and a fast online path selection phase that improves flow throughput at run time. A logically centralized manager uses a genetic algorithm to generate and install paths during multipath configuration, and a local controller performs the multipath selection based on network usage. We analyze TPM for different workloads and topologies under several scenarios of usage database location and update policy, and show that it yields up to 77% throughput gains over traditional approaches.