iLoad: In-network Load Balancing with Programmable Data Plane

Several cloud service and data center providers have announced plans to transition towards environmental-friendly green computing. From a computer networking perspective, such transition requires novel routing approaches over traditional networking protocols, more specifically, end-host-driven load balancing. For example, an end-host may issue a request to change its load, based on its current CPU load or energy availability. Our solution, iLoad, collects such requests from end-hosts and computes the routes entirely in the data plane, providing more efficient and reliable operation of a network.