dotPS: Disorder Tolerant Load Balancing Scheme for Datacenter Network

Recently, with the development of AI technology, load balancing methods are commonly integrated to enhance datacenter network throughput within a spine-leaf architecture. However, traditional load balancing inevitably leads to packet disorder, affecting system efficiency. Considering that network applications can actually tolerate a certain disorder degree, we think the transmission efficiency will be improved without requiring additional processing of packets within a certain disorder tolerance threshold. Thus, we propose a disorder tolerant load balancing scheme called Disorder Tolerant Packet Spray, dotPS. We design the architecture of dotPS, controlling the degree of disorder tolerance to improve transmission efficiency, and propose the concept of a group interval which can be dynamically adjusted as a measurement of disorder tolerance. Then we design a load balancing algorithm based on group interval, requiring strict ordering for inter-group packets while tolerating disorder in intra-group packets. Finally, simulation results dedicate that compared to the state-of-the-art load balancing methods under different network loads, the proposed method reduces the average flow completion time by 8% to 18%.