Loading [a11y]/accessibility-menu.js
Elmo: Source Routed Multicast for Public Clouds | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

Abstract:

We present Elmo, a system that addresses the multicast scalability problem in multi-tenant datacenters. Modern cloud applications frequently exhibit one-to-many communica...Show More

Abstract:

We present Elmo, a system that addresses the multicast scalability problem in multi-tenant datacenters. Modern cloud applications frequently exhibit one-to-many communication patterns and, at the same time, require sub-millisecond latencies and high throughput. IP multicast can achieve these requirements but has control- and data-plane scalability limitations that make it challenging to offer it as a service for hundreds of thousands of tenants, typical of cloud environments. Tenants, therefore, must rely on unicast-based approaches (e.g., application-layer or overlay-based) to support multicast in their applications, imposing bandwidth and end-host CPU overheads, with higher and unpredictable latencies. Elmo scales network multicast by taking advantage of emerging programmable switches and the unique characteristics of data-center networks; specifically, the hypervisor switches, symmetric topology, and short paths in a datacenter. Elmo encodes multicast group information inside packets themselves, reducing the need to store the same information in network switches. In a three-tier data-center topology with 27,000 hosts, Elmo supports a million multicast groups using an average packet-header size of 114 bytes (max. 325 bytes), requiring as few as 1,100 multicast group-table entries on average in leaf switches, and having a traffic overhead as low as 5% over ideal multicast.
Published in: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking ( Volume: 28, Issue: 6, December 2020)
Page(s): 2587 - 2600
Date of Publication: 22 September 2020

ISSN Information:

Funding Agency:


Contact IEEE to Subscribe

References

References is not available for this document.