SDN-based Data Center Network Routing And Scheduling

The emerging Cloud Computing brings great opportunities to data centers, as well as great challenges. The existing data center network(DCN) architectures, along with routing protocols and scheduling policies, can not meet the requirements of Cloud.In this paper, we introduce the speci?city and typical topologies of DCN, along with existing routing and scheduling strategies. We also introduce Software De?ned Networks(SDN), the key idea of decoupling control plane from data plane. In contrast with OSPF, we propose SRP, a routing protocol designed for DCN. We show that SRP outperforms OSPF with a much faster convergence time by simulation in ns-3. We also implement SRP in real-world switches, showing that SRP is as e?icient as OSPF even for a small-scale network where route recomputation of OSPF does not take a long time. We extend SRP with weighted routing to e?icently schedule network ?ows.We survey on Software De?ned Routing Platforms, which integrates SDN/OpenFlow within IP routing. We focus on the resilience aspect of the platforms, and evaluate the performance of the mainstream SDN-based platform(i.e., RouteFlow) using both the emulator Mininet and a real-world testbed with physical switches. The evaluation results show that RouteFlow is resilient when facing single link failure. Moreover,RouteFlow achieves a comparable performance with legacy distributed routing protocols. Furthermore, we leverage the idea of SDN to extend SRP, using a centralized controller to extend SRP(SDN-SRP) to achieve a better performance on routing and scheduling.