Equal-Cost Multipath Routing in Data Center Network Based on Software Defined Network

Abstract

In Data Center facilities, network performance is crucial. The system performance requirements are usually high throughput and packet loss sensitive. In addition, the data center also requires redundant links, in order to avoid the occurrence of failure in the network. Applying topologies such as as fat-tree can solve the redundant link needs problem. However, the use of redundant links that are only used as backups are considered ineffective. A routing mechanism that can exploit the potential of existing links sufficiently is required. Equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP) is a routing scheme that can be implemented to solve the problem. With the implementation of software defined network (SDN) on the network, the construction of this routing scheme will be more accessible. The ECMP scheme utilizes modified Dijkstra's algorithm to search for the shortest path, and uses the modulo-n hashing method in the selection of the delivery path. This paper implements ECMP scheme on fat-tree topology with SDN-based network. The results obtained in this study prove that the network implementing ECMP can provide a throughput difference of 60.14Mbps when compared with static routing in a 20Mbps bandwidth traffic test scenario. Also the ECMP network can provide 15.72% less packet loss compared to static routing networks.