Frame-level traffic splitting for link aggregation in data center networks

Ethernet link aggregation, which provides an easy and cost-effective way to increase both bandwidth and link availability between a pair of devices, is well suited for data center networks. However, all the traffic splitting algorithms used in existing Ethernet link aggregation are flow-level which do not work well owing to the traffic characteristics of data centers. Though frame-level traffic splitting can achieve optimal load balance and the maximum benefits from aggregated capacity, it is generally deprecated in most cases because of frame disordering which can disrupt the operation of many Internet protocols, most notably transmission control protocol (TCP). To address this issue, we first investigate the causes of frame disordering in link aggregation and find that all of them either are no longer true or can be prevented in data centers. Then we present a byte-counter frame-level traffic splitting algorithm which achieves optimal performance while causes no frame disordering. The only requirement is that frames in a flow are the same size which can be easily met in data centers. Simulation results show that the proposed frame-level traffic splitting method could achieve higher throughput and optimal load balance. The average completion time of different sized flows is reduced by 24% on average and by up to 46%.