ProTE: An openflow based traffic engineering mechanism for data center networks

Today's data center topologies mostly comprise multi-rooted trees with many equal-cost paths between the (source, destination) node pairs. Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) forwarding is extensively used to leverage the multipath diversity in data center networks. However, ECMP forwarding might reduce the overall throughput significantly because of the random hash collision between multiple large flows. In this paper, we present an OpenFlow based traffic engineering mechanism named Proactive Traffic Engineering (ProTE), which uses proactive approach to assign optimal paths to flows in a multi-stage data center network by using polling mechanism which polls the edge and aggregation switches to collect statistics and perform flow scheduling after every few seconds. The comparison of scheduling performance of ProTE against Hedera and ECMP shows that ProTE performs better than Hedera and ECMP.