Joint Static and Dynamic Traffic Scheduling in Data Center Networks

Abstract

The advent and continued growth of large data centers has led to much interest in switch architectures that can economically meet the high capacities needed for interconnecting the thousands of servers in these data centers. Various multilayer architectures employing thousands of switches have been proposed in the literature. We make use of the observation that the traffic in a data center is a mixture of relatively static and rapidly fluctuating components, and develop a combined scheduler for both these components using a generalization of the load-balanced scheduler. The presence of the known static component introduces asymmetries in the ingress-egress capacities, which preclude the use of a load-balanced scheduler as is. We generalize the load-balanced scheduler and also incorporate an opportunistic scheduler that sends traffic on a direct path when feasible to enhance the overall switch throughput. Our evaluations show that this scheduler works very well despite avoiding the use of a central scheduler for making packet-by-packet scheduling decisions.