APS: Adaptive Packet Spraying to Isolate Mix-Flows in Data Center Network

Abstract

Modern data centers host diverse applications, which generate a mix of short flows with stringent latency requirement and long flows requiring large sustained throughput. To solve the problem of resource competition between the mixed flows, we propose an adaptive traffic isolation scheme APS. Based on the packet spraying scheme in the multipath transmission, APS dynamically separates long flows from short ones on different paths to provide the low latency for the short flows. Meanwhile, to resolve the out-of-order problem, APS limits the long flows to a few paths with Equal Cost Multi Path (ECMP). Experimental results of NS2 simulation and testbed implementation show that, APS reduces the average completion time for short flows by up to 60 percent and increases the throughputs for long flows by about 1.68x over the state-of-the-art multipath transmission schemes.