In DCN, congestion occurs in only up to a few seconds. This congestion can be alleviated if optimal routing is used. However, existing traffic engineering technique fail to provide any of the following:

  • Utilize multipath diversity
  • Adapt to instantaneous load
  • Use a global view to make routing decisions

This paper propose to monitor traffic at NICs and couple with OpenFlow to do MicroTE. The architecture is as follows:

  • Top-of-rack switch or end-hosts monitor traffic and gather statistics.
  • Controller collect statistics, either by polling switches regularly or end-hosts feed data to controllers
  • Controller compile the global view of network and send to routing component
  • Routing component computes route
  • If new route is different from current one significantly, new route is used, though OpenFlow update.

Bibliographic data

@inproceedings{
   title = "The Case for Fine-grained Traffic Engineering in Data-centers",
   author = "Theophilus Benson and Ashok Anand and Aditya Akella and Ming Zhang",
   booktitle = "Proc INM/WREN",
   month = "Apr",
   year = "2010",
   address = "San Jose, CA",
}