eBA: Efficient Bandwidth Guarantee Under Traffic Variability in Datacenters

Datacenter networks suffer unpredictable performance due to a lack of application level bandwidth guarantees. A lot of attention has been drawn to solve this problem such as how to provide bandwidth guarantees for virtualized machines (VMs), proportional bandwidth share among tenants, and high network utilization under peak traffic. However, existing solutions fail to cope with highly dynamic traffic in datacenter networks. In this paper, we propose eBA, an efficient solution to bandwidth allocation that provides end-to-end bandwidth guarantee for VMs under large numbers of short flows and massive bursty traffic in datacenters. eBA leverages a novel distributed VM-to-VM rate control algorithm based on the logistic model under the control-theoretic framework. eBA’s implementation requires no changes to hardware or applications and can be deployed in standard protocol stack. The theoretical analysis and the experimental results show that eBA not only guarantees the bandwidth for VMs, but also provides fast convergence to efficiency and fairness, as well as smooth response to bursty traffic.