WCMP: weighted cost multipathing for improved fairness in data centers
Data Center topologies employ multiple paths among servers to deliver scalable, cost-effective network capacity. The simplest and the most widely deployed approach for load balancing among these paths, Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP), hashes flows among the shortest paths toward a destination. ECMP leverages uniform hashing of balanced flow sizes to achieve fairness and good load balancing in data centers. However, we show that ECMP further assumes a balanced, regular, and fault-free topology, which are invalid assumptions in practice that can lead to substantial performance degradation and, worse, variation in flow bandwidths even for same size flows.