Spotlight: Scalable Transport Layer Load Balancing for Data Center Networks

Ashkan Aghdai, Cing Yu Chu, Yang Xu, David H. Dai, Jun Xu, H. Jonathan Chao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Load Balancing plays a vital role in cloud data centers to distribute traffic among instances of network functions or services. State-of-the-art load balancers dispatch traffic obliviously without considering the real-time utilization of service instances and therefore can lead to uneven load distribution and sub-optimal performance. In this article, we design and implement Spotlight, a scalable and distributed load balancing architecture that maintains connection-to-instance mapping consistency at the edge of data center networks. Spotlight uses a new stateful flow dispatcher which periodically polls instances' load and dispatches incoming connections to instances in proportion to their available capacity. Our design utilizes a distributed control plane and in-band flow dispatching; thus, it scales horizontally in data center networks. Through extensive flow-level simulation and packet-level experiments on a testbed with HTTP traffic on unmodified Linux kernel, we demonstrate that compared to existing methods Spotlight distributes traffic more efficiently and has near-optimum performance in terms of overall service utilization. Compared to existing solutions, Spotlight improves aggregated throughput and average flow completion time by at least 20 percent with infrequent control plane updates. Moreover, we show that Spotlight scales horizontally as it updates the switches at O(100ms) and is resilient to lack of control plane convergence.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2131-2145
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
Volume10
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Software defined networks
  • network function virtualization
  • scalability
  • transport layer load balancing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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