DCCast: Efficient Point to Multipoint Transfers Across Datacenters

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/fg2e5
• Publication Date: 2018-07-02T11:01:06Z
• Authors: Max Noormohammadpour; Cauligi S. Raghav...; Sriram Rao; Srikanth Kandula
• Keywords: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Performance; Computer Sciences; rate limiting; point to multipoint transfers; OS and Networks; Systems and Control (eess.SY); 02 engineering and technology; Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Systems and Control; Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture; Performance (cs.PF); data centers; Computer Science - Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing; wide area networks; FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Physical Sciences and Mathematics; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; forwarding trees; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); multicasting

Using multiple datacenters allows for higher availability, load balancing and reduced latency to customers of cloud services. To distribute multiple copies of data, cloud providers depend on inter-datacenter WANs that ought to be used efficiently considering their limited capacity and the ever-increasing data demands. In this paper, we focus on applications that transfer objects from one datacenter to several datacenters over dedicated inter-datacenter networks. We present DCCast, a centralized Point to Multi-Point (P2MP) algorithm that uses forwarding trees to efficiently deliver an object from a source datacenter to required destination datacenters. With low computational overhead, DCCast selects forwarding trees that minimize bandwidth usage and balance load across all links. With simulation experiments on Google’s GScale network, we show that DCCast can reduce total bandwidth usage and tail Transfer Completion Times (TCT) by up to 50% compared to delivering the same objects via independent point-to-point (P2P) transfers.