Efficient Coflow Scheduling in Hybrid-Switched Data Center Networks

Abstract: To improve the application-level communication performance, scheduling of coflows, a collection of parallel flows sharing the same objective, is prevalent in modern data center networks (DCNs). Meanwhile, a hybrid-switched DCN design combining optical circuit switches (OPS) and electrical packet switches (EPS) for transmitting high-volume traffic and low-volume traffic separately has received considerable research attention recently. Efficient scheduling of coflows on hybrid network links is crucial for reducing the overall communication time. However, because of the reconfiguration delay in the circuit switch due to the ultra-high transmission rate and the limitation of bandwidth in the packet switch, coflow scheduling becomes increasingly challenging. The existing coflow scheduling algorithms in hybrid-switched DCNs are all heuristic and provide no performance guarantees. In this work, we propose an approximation algorithm with the worst-case performance guarantee of 2+ \lambda?, where \lambda? is a factor related to system parameters and demand characteristics, for single coflow scheduling in hybridswitched DCN to minimize the coflow completion time (CCT). Extensive simulations based on Facebook data traces show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes Solstice by 1.14? and Reco-Sin by 1.42? in terms of minimizing CCT.