SynRace: Decentralized Load-Adaptive Multi-path Routing without Collecting Statistics

Multi-rooted trees are becoming the norm for modern data-center networks. In these networks, scalable flow routing is challenging owing to vast number of flows. Current approaches either employ a central controller that can have scalability issues or a scalable decentralized algorithm only considering local information. In this paper we present a new decentralized approach to least-congested path routing in software-defined data center networks that has neither of these issues: By duplicating the initial (or SYN) packet of a flow and estimating the data rate of multiple flows in parallel, we exploit TCP’s habit to fill buffers to find the least congested path. We show that our algorithm significantly improves flow completion time without the need for a central controller or specialized hardware.