Bartolomeu: An SDN rebalancing system across multiple interdomain paths

Abstract

Bartolomeu is a solution to enable stub networks to perform adaptive egress traffic load balancing across multiple interdomain routes by spreading the traffic across available paths according to a passive measurement of their performance. It defines a BGP-SDN architecture that increases the number of BGP routes that can be used by stub networks. Bartolomeu measures the available capacity of each path to any destination prefix, and allocates to each path a number of large flows that is proportional to its capacity. This strategy reduces the mean sojourn time, i.e., mean time to flow completion, compared to state-of-the-art traffic balancing techniques as ECMP. We develop a mathematical model to compute this time and compare with ECMP and single path (fast path) selection. An analysis of the traffic traces of two content providers was performed to ensure that our solution is deployable. An experiment with traffic exchange over the Internet is used to show that Bartolomeu can provide gains with real interfering traffic. A discrete-event simulator fed with the traces captured is used to asses Bartolomeu’s gains with prefixes with different number of flows, and flows with different sizes and arrival time. We observe in this experiment that Bartolomeu can reduce the sojourn time, compared to ECMP, by half when path rates differ in a factor of 3, or to a sixth when path rates differ in a factor of 10. We compute the maximum number of per-flow entries and the maximum entry change request rate to show that the resources required fit in with the specifications of the current generation of SDN switches.