A Distributed Ethernet Traffic Shaping system

Abstract

We present a Distributed Ethernet Traffic Shaping (DETS) system for regulating the flow of data when multiple virtual machines run on one host and share a single Ethernet link to send and receive traffic in a cluster or a data center. In such settings, virtual machines can undermine each other's ability to receive traffic on the shared link. In DETS, sending machines monitor and regulate their transmission rates to conform to target rates. The DETS system is implemented in the host system, and there is no need to change or modify any processing or networking hardware. We describe an implementation on a Linux-based cluster, and through experimental performance evaluations, we show that DETS can guarantee the access rate of virtual machines. We also describe modifications to the Ethernet control plane so that DETS can be natively supported in Ethernet networks.