A Novel Approach to IP Traffic Splitting Using Flowlets

TCP's burstiness is usually regarded as harmful, or at best, inconvenient. Instead, this thesis suggests a new perspective and examines whether TCP's burstiness is useful for certain applications. It claims that burstiness can be harnessed to insulate traffic from packet reordering caused by route change. We introduce the use of flowlets, a new abstraction for a burst of packets from a particular flow followed by an idle interval. We apply flowlets to the routing of traffic along multiple paths and develop a scheme using flowlet-switching to split traffic across multiple parallel paths. Flowlet switching is an ideal technique for load balancing traffic across multiple paths as it achieves the accuracy of packet-switching and the robustness to packet reordering of flow-switching. This research evaluates the accuracy, simplicity, overhead and robustness to reordering flowlet switching entails. Using a combination of trace analysis and network simulation, we demonstrate the feasibility of implementing flowlet-based switching. Thesis Supervisor: Dina Katabi Title: Assistant Professor