Flow splitting scheme over link‐disjoint multiple paths in software‐defined networking

Abstract

Multipath networking schemes can be employed to efficiently balance traffic and address link failures. However, these schemes can also cause packet disorder, thereby deteriorating the overall network performance. To address these problems, we propose splitting a single flow over a multipath scheme (SFMS) at a fine granularity based on software-defined networking. The SFMS splits an elephant flow into several subflows according to the residual bandwidths and delays of the link-disjointed paths inter the data centers (inter-DC) network to enhance the transmission efficiency of traffic. The experimental results confirm that the SFMS not only reduces the flow completion time required from the time the first packet of an elephant flow is sent until the last packet is received while avoiding packet disorder.