Software Defined Agile Load Balancing

we propose slab (software defined agile load balancing), a network load balancing architecture for datacenters that uses recent advances in software-defined networking (sdn) to achieve efficient, failure-resilient, agile, and deployable load balancing solution. slab has three key components: 1) a fine-grained per-packet load balancing mechanism at the switches to evenly spread packets across multiple paths 2) a mechanism for detecting different types of failures (e.g., partial link failures and full link failures) 3) an sdn based logically centralized control plane for dynamically adapting load balancing in case of failures and topological asymmetries slab has been evaluated on (a) a small-scale custom-built datacenter and (b) large-scale packet-level simulations. the datacenter will be built using sdn/openflow switches. we have evaluated slab over widely used datacenter topologies (e.g., 2-stage clos) as well as over real application workloads such as web search, and data mining.