An SDN architecture for improving throughput of large flows using multipath TCP

The recent developments in data center topologies offer high bandwidth capacity and multiple paths between processing nodes. The increased use of cloud computing applications imposes challenges on underlying network infrastructure. To meet these challenges we need efficient traffic management that can maximize the utilization of multi-path data center networks. Path diversity not only provides the opportunity of performing load balancing and improve fault tolerance, but also can be exploited to allocate more bandwidth for large flows and improve the performance of network-limited applications. In this paper, we present an architecture based on Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) to provide better bandwidth allocation for large flows. The SDN controller, which has global knowledge of network topology and traffic measurements, is capable of making educated routing decisions. The proposed SDN architecture enables applications to achieve better throughput for large flows by initiating new MPTCP subflows. To provide this capability, we modify the Linux kernel MPTCP implementation to enable applications to create additional MPTCP subflows on-demand. These MPTCP subflows are placed on least-congested paths by the centralized controller. The evaluation results obtained from running experiments on the GENI testbed environment show a significant improvement in the throughput of large flows.