Data Rate Guarantee for Coflow scheduling in network function virtualization

In data centers, a lot of cluster computing applications follow a coflow pattern. On the other hand, network function virtualization (NFV) sufficiently improves the performance of the data center network. However, coflows encounter extremely different processing delays under diverse network functions. Traditional coflow scheduling schemes become insufficient in this situation. Based on the observation that the benefit of coflows is closely related to the data rates of flows, we propose DRGC (Data Rate Guarantee for Coflow) to guarantee the data rate requirements of coflows in the NFV environment. We prioritize the scheduling sequence of coflows, precisely allocate data rates for individual flows, and design an efficient scheduling algorithm. DRGC maintains the desired data rates of coflows with higher priorities at middleboxes and leaves more scheduling opportunities to the ones with lower priorities. In the large-scale trace-driven experiment, DRGC efficiently guarantees the data rate requirements of coflows and supports more 15% workload, compared with other scheduling schemes.