DCFlow:A SDN Flow Scheduling Mechanism With Centralized Control Scheme And Localized Routing Method

With the emergence and development of large-scale datacenters,how to improve network traffic performance to meet the new characteristics of these datacenters is a more and more extensively researched topic.The most important target of network traffic control is to improve network throughput and to reduce latency.Meanwhile,SDN(Software Defined Network),as an innovative technology,provides the overall network status to network managers,thus enable centralized flow scheduling,which is impossible for traditional networks.This advantage motivates network managers to make full use of SDN in datacenter networks.This paper aims to present DCFlow,a SDN flow scheduling mechanism with centralized control scheme and localized routing method to maximize network throughput and to minimize flow latency in data centers.DCFlow discovers network topology and monitors network status with a simple and effective scheme,schedules “elephant” flows based on a scalable “Maxmin” algorithm,and forwards “mice” flows with multipath routing method based on a scalable “KeepForwarding” algorithm.Moreover,DCFlow takes business application into consideration.DCFlow only requires switches to monitor each port instead each flow,which could ease the deployment of DCFlow and reduce costs.The other requirements to switches are also what SDN switches must support.Evaluation results show that DCFlow improves network throughput by 10% when mice flows dominate the network traffic,and reduces mice flow latency by at least 60% compared to the standard SDN model.