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A scalable load balancer for forwarding internet traffic: exploiting flow-level burstiness

Published: 26 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Packet scheduling in parallel forwarding systems is a hard problem. Two major goals of a scheduler that distributes incoming packets to multiple forwarding engines are to achieve high system utilization (by balancing the load evenly among the multiple engines) and to maintain packet ordering within individual flows. Additionally, from the viewpoint of the overall performance, the system should exhibit a good cache behavior by preserving temporal locality in the workload of each forwarding engine. In this paper, we show how the burstiness in Internet flows can be exploited to improve the performance of the scheduler. Specifically, TCP flows, which contribute to over 90 percent of the Internet traffic, transmit in bursts with relatively large delays in between. We propose a load balancing scheme based on this insight to achieve the scheduling goals. Our design is verified by simulations driven by real-world traces.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANCS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Architecture for networking and communications systems
    October 2005
    230 pages
    ISBN:1595930825
    DOI:10.1145/1095890
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    Publication History

    Published: 26 October 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. TCP
    2. bursty traffic
    3. hashing
    4. load balancing
    5. parallel forwarding

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    • (2016)A Practical Large-Capacity Three-Stage Buffered Clos-Network Switch ArchitectureIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2015.240861427:2(317-328)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2016
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    • (2012)Load-Balancing Multipath Switching System with Flow SliceIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2010.27961:3(350-365)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2012
    • (2012)Load balancing with minimal flow remapping for network processors2012 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)10.1109/ISCC.2012.6249373(000662-000666)Online publication date: Jul-2012
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