EFM: Improving DCNs throughput using the transmission rates of elephant flows

Abstract

One of the major issues in Data Center Networks (DCNs) is related to elephant flows. These flows typically are primarily responsible for network congestion, causing impacts on applications that are intolerant to delays. Although there are several works in the literature that analyze this type of traffic, none of them consider the impact of elephant flow size on the throughput and on the Flow Completion Time (FCT). This article presents the EFM (Elephant Flow Manager) as a complete solution for monitoring and re-routing elephant flows in DCNs, by observing the size of these flows in the network. The tests performed show that the size of the elephant flows influences the throughput and the FCT of the applications and, therefore, deserves to be observed. The evaluation of the solution was performed comparing the joint use of EFM with ECMP (EqualCost Multi-path). In all tests, our re-routing solution proved to be better when compared to pure routing solely with ECMP. Then, this paper presents three main contributions: (1) it compares our solution with the ECMP, (2) highlights the importance of the size of the elephant flows in the re-routing of these in DCNs and (3) preliminary tests indicate that due to the decrease in FCT, it is possible to reduce the energy consumption in the data center.