Scalable and Reliable Data Center Networks by Combining Source Routing and Automatic Labelling

Today, most user services are based on cloud computing, which leverages data center networks (DCNs) to efficiently route its communications. These networks process high volumes of traffic and require exhaustive failure management. Furthermore, expanding these networks is usually costly due to their constraint designs. In this article, we present enhanced Torii (eTorii), an automatic, scalable, reliable and flexible multipath routing protocol that aims to accomplish the demanding requirements of DCNs. We prove that eTorii is, by definition, applicable to a wide range of DCNs or any other type of hierarchical network and able to route with minimum forwarding table size and capable of rerouting around failed links on-the-fly with almost zero cost. A proof of concept of the eTorii protocol has been implemented using the Ryu SDN controller and the Mininet framework. Its evaluation shows that eTorii balances the load and preserves high-bandwidth utilization. Thus, it optimizes the use of DCN resources in comparison to other approaches, such as Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP).