Shan Sinha, Srikanth Kandula, Dina Katabi
3rd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), San Diego, CA, November 2004
TCP's burstiness is usually regarded as harmful, or at best,
inconvenient. This paper adopts a new perspective and examines
whether TCP's burstiness is useful for certain applications. It shows
that the burstiness can be harnessed to make TCP more robust to packet
reordering caused by route change. We define a flowlet as a burst of
packets from the same flow followed by an idle interval. We develop a
scheme that uses flowlets to split traffic across multiple parallel
paths. We show that flowlet switching is an ideal technique for load
balancing traffic across multiple paths as it has the accuracy of
packet switching, combined with the robustness of flow switching to
packet reordering. The accuracy, simplicity, and low-overhead of
flowlet switching makes it a strong candidate for replacing the
current hash-based schemes used in routers for splitting traffic
across multiple links. Further, flowlet switching accurately splits
traffic across various paths even when their desired traffic shares
vary over time, providing a key component for research in the areas of
adaptive multipath routing, adaptive multihoming, and traffic
engineering.
[PostScript (514KB)]
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{sinha2004harnessing,
author = "Shan Sinha and Srikanth Kandula and Dina Katabi",
title = "{Harnessing TCPs Burstiness using Flowlet Switching}",
booktitle = {3rd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets)},
year = {2004},
month = {November},
address = {San Diego, CA}
}