Arbitration of many thousand flows at 100G and beyond

Abstract

Network devices supporting above-100G links are needed today in order to scale communication bandwidth along with the processing capabilities of computing nodes in data centers and warehouse computers. In this paper, we propose a light-weight, fair scheduler for such ultra high-speed links, and an arbitrarily large number of requestors. We show that, in practice, our first algorithm, as well its predecessor, DRR, may result in bursty service even in the common case, where flow weights are approximately equal, and we identify applications where this can damage performance. Our second contribution is an enhancement that improves short-term fairness to deliver very smooth service when flow weights are approximately equal, whilst allocating bandwidth in a weighted fair manner. Copyright 2013 ACM.