Multi-hop Coflow Routing and Scheduling in Data Centers

Communication in data centers often involves many parallel flows that all share the same performance goal. A useful abstraction, coflow, is proposed to express the communication requirements of prevalent data parallel paradigms. The multiple coflow routing and scheduling problem faces challenges when deriving a good theoretical performance ratio because coexisting coflows will compete for the same network resources such as link bandwidths. In this paper, we focus on the coflow problem in the most popular data center infrastructure: the Leaf-Spine topology. We first formulate the problem and study the path selection issue on this two-tier structure. In order to minimize the average coflow completion time (CCT), we propose a Multihop Coflow Routing and Scheduling strategy (MCRS) for intercoflows and intra-coflows and prove that our method has a reasonably good competitive ratio. Extensive experiments show that MCRS outperforms other state-of-art schemes.