FMap: A fuzzy map for scheduling elephant flows through jumping traveling salesman problem variant toward software-defined networking-based data center networks

Abstract

Nowadays data center networks (DCNs) should handle the ever-growing load generated by diverse applications. It particularly occurs under concurrent flow requests and so-called mice flows (MFs): elephant flows (EFs) ratio. Concentrating on a binary vision over flow size classification (EF or MF) results in subsequent unpredicted load imbalance due to neglecting EF's distinctions including a wide range of sizes. As a result, some EFs might utilize a path owing qualities beyond the given EF's demands, while another EF with higher requirements is attending to use an over-utilized path. This article proposes FMap, a fuzzy map for scheduling EFs through our proposed variant of traveling salesperson problem (TSP) toward DCNs. FMap represents a novel EF scheduling scheme that integrates flow prioritization and routing decisions under the event pf parallel incoming flows besides the cooperation of the controller and OpenFlow switches in software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm. FMap adopts fuzzy inference process to overcome the vagueness over EF's resource allocation. Mainly, FMap proposes a new variant of TSP (optimized by genetic algorithm) which enables EF's group forwarding with a minimum cost. FMap reduces the total hop count of EFs through considering a single optimal path for delivering groups of EFs that contain a same tag (priority). The outstanding results represent a major improvement as compared with equal cost multiple path, Hedera, Sonoum, and Size-KP-PSO. Particularly, the results illustrate an outperforming by 3.76×, 0.21×, 0.15×, 0.03×, and 0.03× in terms of total hop count, EFs FCT, packet loss, goodput, and received packets as compared with Size-KP-PSO, respectively. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.