A distributed load balancing architecture based on in-band network telemetry

A data center (DC) is supposed to efficiently distribute the bandwidth of the network to provide high-quality traffic transmission. However, the load imbalance issue can easily occur due to the complex topology and traffic features. Equal-Cost Multi-Path(ECMP) distributes traffic on different paths but doesn't consider network congestion. Although HULA solved some of ECMP's problems, it can easily congest the best path. RPS randomly distributes packets across multiple paths, potentially causing packet reordering in certain scenarios. This paper presents DHLB, a distributed hop-by-hop load balancing architecture based on in-band network telemetry. With active In-band network telemetry, DHLB gathers essential load information and systematically records it in a load information table. DHLB distributes traffic proportionally on different paths based on their load degree. We build a fat tree topology on mininet to verify the performance of our design. Experimental results indicate that DHLB outperforms other schemes regarding average Flow Completion Time (FCT). It also performs better on additional overhead than another probe-based scheme.