Multipath bandwidth guarantees for multi-tenant cloud networking

Resource isolation of the computation and storage in the cloud is relatively mature, but the network resource is still shared among tenants leading to variable and unpredictable network performance when bandwidth guarantees are not enforced. Currently most of the bandwidth guarantee approaches are based on the idea of single-path reservation without fully exploiting the multipath resource, which leads to poor network utilization. In this paper, we propose a multi-path bandwidth guarantee approach called MultiBand, which provides bandwidth guarantees by allocating bandwidth across multiple paths. We utilize label-based routing technique to explicitly control the packets' transmission paths, and design a MHTB rate limiter model to split and schedule the traffic over the multiple reserved paths. Besides, Our Multiband solution has the work-conserving property. We evaluated our approach through simulations with realistic topologies and typical traffic patterns. Our results show that MultiBand is able to provide multipath bandwidth guarantees and to achieve higher network utility and tenant throughput compared with those of current approaches.