Abstract—Packet loss degrades the performance of various cloud services and reliability still plays a critical role in data center network. In this paper, we propose an approach to achieve reliability by strategically spreading traffic onto concurrent multiple paths while FEC is employed. Moreover, to fully develop the potential of path diversity, the rate allocation problem across multiple paths is studied and we propose a heuristic polynomial optimal algorithm to find a rate vector to maximize the mathematical expectation of correctly received packets in one FEC group. Extensive experiments are conducted utilizing packet-level traces from real data center networks and the evaluation results demonstrate clearly that our approach achieves high reliability effectively.

Index Terms—Data center network, reliability, path diversity, rate allocation, FEC

Cite: Tan Chen and Guangwu Hu, “Reliable Multipath Transmission in Data Center Network," Journal of Communications, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 939-946, 2015. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.10.12.939-946