Baseline Parametric Survey on Causes of Traffic Congestion in Datacenter Networks

Distributed cloud datacenters are currently used as deployment environment for large-scale web-facing enterprise analytic cloud applications. In the era of cloud computing, these networks allow unprecedented scalability in response to dynamic and unpredictable grid workloads. However, grid applications need to scale beyond the limits of single-tenanted datacenter to multi-tenanted datacenter sites providing regulatory service level compliance, efficient Quality of Service (QoS) and increased fault tolerance at all times. Following the complex hierarchical design structure of emerging cloud networks such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Fog Computing Networks (FCNs), congestion crisis becomes a critical consideration for future expansion of these networks. This paper carried out a Baseline Parametric Survey (BPS) to ascertain major factors of DCN traffic congestion in selected production networks in Nigeria. From the survey, it was observed that the absence of an intelligent load balancer, bandwidth size, network traffic type, and network switch butter capacity, number of users on the network, segmentation and routing devices all contribute to network congestion incidence. The deductions from this work can be used to implement a Fog internet layer for smarter data off-loading in today’s internet of everything.