@inproceedings{d97dae67c6964654a9af4dfde1ea3bf6,
title = "Charon: Load-Aware Load-Balancing in P4",
abstract = "Load-Balancers play an important role in data centers as they distribute network flows across application servers and guarantee per-connection consistency. It is hard however to make fair load balancing decisions so that all resources are efficiently occupied yet not overloaded. Tracking connection states allows to infer server load states and make informed decisions, but at the cost of additional memory space consumption. This makes it hard to implement on programmable hardware, which has constrained memory but offers line-rate performance. This paper presents Charon, a stateless load-aware load balancer that has line-rate performance implemented in P4-NetFPGA. Charon passively collects load states from application servers and employs the power-of-2-choices scheme to make data-driven load balancing decisions and improve resource utilization. Per-connection consistency is preserved statelessly by encoding server ID in a covert channel. The prototype design and implementation details are described in this paper. Simulation results show performance gains in terms of load distribution fairness, quality of service, throughput and processing latency.",
keywords = "cloud and distributed computing, load-balancing",
author = "Carmine Rizzi and Zhiyuan Yao and Yoann Desmouceaux and Mark Townsley and Thomas Clausen",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 IFIP.; 17th International Conference on Network and Service Management, CNSM 2021 ; Conference date: 25-10-2021 Through 29-10-2021",
year = "2021",
month = jan,
day = "1",
doi = "10.23919/CNSM52442.2021.9615535",
language = "English",
series = "Proceedings of the 2021 17th International Conference on Network and Service Management: Smart Management for Future Networks and Services, CNSM 2021",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
pages = "91--97",
editor = "Prosper Chemouil and Mehmet Ulema and Stuart Clayman and Muge Sayit and Cihat Cetinkaya and Stefano Secci",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 17th International Conference on Network and Service Management",
}