FMap: A fuzzy map for scheduling elephant flows through jumping traveling salesman problem variant toward software‐defined networking‐based data center networks

Abstract

SummaryNowadays data center networks (DCNs) should handle the ever‐growing load generated by diverse applications. It particularly occurs under concurrent flow requests and so‐called mice flows (MFs): elephant flows (EFs) ratio. Concentrating on a binary vision over flow size classification (EF or MF) results in subsequent unpredicted load imbalance due to neglecting EF's distinctions including a wide range of sizes. As a result, some EFs might utilize a path owing qualities beyond the given EF's demands, while another EF with higher requirements is attending to use an over‐utilized path. This article proposes FMap, a fuzzy map for scheduling EFs through our proposed variant of traveling salesperson problem (TSP) toward DCNs. FMap represents a novel EF scheduling scheme that integrates flow prioritization and routing decisions under the event pf parallel incoming flows besides the cooperation of the controller and OpenFlow switches in software‐defined networking (SDN) paradigm. FMap adopts fuzzy inference process to overcome the vagueness over EF's resource allocation. Mainly, FMap proposes a new variant of TSP (optimized by genetic algorithm) which enables EF's group forwarding with a minimum cost. FMap reduces the total hop count of EFs through considering a single optimal path for delivering groups of EFs that contain a same tag (priority). The outstanding results represent a major improvement as compared with equal cost multiple path, Hedera, Sonoum, and Size‐KP‐PSO. Particularly, the results illustrate an outperforming by 3.76×, 0.21×, 0.15×, 0.03×, and 0.03× in terms of total hop count, EFs FCT, packet loss, goodput, and received packets as compared with Size‐KP‐PSO, respectively.