On the Efficacy of Fine-Grained Traffic Splitting Protocols in Data Center Networks

Multi-rooted tree topologies are commonly used to construct high-bandwidth data center network fabrics. In these networks, switches typically rely on Equal-Cost MultiPath (ECMP) routing techniques to split traffic across multiple paths, where each flow is routed through one of the available paths, but packets within a flow traverse the same end-to-end path. Unfortunately, since ECMP splits traffic based on flow-granularity, it can cause load imbalance across multiple paths resulting in poor utilization of network resources.