Load balancing method and apparatus for ethernet over SONET and other types of networks

• US 20050185584A1
• Filed: 02/24/2004
• Published: 08/25/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 02/24/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: RPX Corporation
• Original Assignee: Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc. (Nokia Corporation)
• Inventors: Winzer, Peter J., Zirngibl, Martin, Stiliadis, Dimitrios, Nagesh, Harsha S., Poosala, Viswanath
• Granted Patent: US 7,440,404 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/235
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/10 Flow control; Congestion control
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/43 Assembling or disassembling of packets, e.g. segmentation and reassembly [SAR]

Abstract

A load-balanced network architecture is disclosed in which a traffic flow at a given network node is split into a plurality of parts, and the parts are distributed to respective ones of the plurality of nodes that are designated as participating in a load balancing process for the traffic flow. Each of at least a subset of the participating nodes receiving one of the parts routes at least a portion of its received part to one or more destination nodes.

Claims

1. A method of processing a traffic flow in a communication network comprising a plurality of nodes, the method comprising the steps of:

splitting the traffic flow into a plurality of parts; and

distributing the parts to respective ones of the plurality of nodes that are designated as participating in a load balancing process for the traffic flow;

wherein each of at least a subset of the participating nodes receiving one of the parts routes at least a portion of its received part to one or more destination nodes of the plurality of nodes.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow comprises an incoming packet flow arriving at a given one of the nodes.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow is split into the plurality of parts in a manner independent of the one or more destination nodes.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow is split into a plurality of substantially equal parts.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow is split into a plurality of parts at least two of which comprise non-equal parts.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein traffic flow comprises virtually-concatenated data traffic.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow is split into N parts at a given one of the nodes by maintaining N queues at the given node, and filling the queues from the traffic flow in accordance with a specified queue-filling technique.

8. The method of claim 7 wherein the specified queue-filling technique comprises one of a round-robin technique and a shortest queue first technique.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow is split into the plurality of parts utilizing a virtual concatenation technique.

10. The method of claim 1 wherein the traffic flow is split into the plurality of parts in such a manner that a desired packet format of the traffic flow is maintained in each of the plurality of parts.

11. The method of claim 1 wherein the parts of the traffic flow are distributed to the respective ones of the participating nodes over pre-provisioned circuits each configured to support a corresponding one of the parts.

12. The method of claim 1 wherein a given one of the participating nodes routes at least a portion of its received part to a set of destination nodes determined based on destination addresses in packet headers of the portion.

13. The method of claim 1 wherein if the packet header of a given packet in the part of the flow received by a given one of the participating nodes indicates that the participating node is a final destination node for that packet, the packet is stored in a resequencing buffer of the participating node.

14. The method of claim 1 wherein if the packet header of a given packet in the part of the flow received by a given one of the participating nodes indicates that the participating node is not a final destination node for that packet, the packet is stored in a particular one of a plurality of output queues of the participating node that is associated with the final destination node for the packet.

15. The method of claim 1 wherein at least one of the splitting step and the distributing step is implemented at least in part in software running on a processor of a node or other element of the network.

16. An apparatus for use in processing a traffic flow in a communication network comprising a plurality of nodes, the apparatus comprising:

a processing device comprising a processor coupled to a memory, the processing device being operative to split the traffic flow into a plurality of parts, and to distribute the parts to respective ones of the plurality of nodes that are designated as participating in a load balancing process for the traffic flow;

wherein each of at least a subset of the participating nodes receiving one of the parts routes at least a portion of its received part to one or more destination nodes of the plurality of nodes.

17. The apparatus of claim 16 wherein the processing device comprises one of the participating nodes of the network.

18. The apparatus of claim 16 wherein the processing device is implemented as one or more integrated circuits.

19. An article of manufacture comprising a machine-readable medium storing one or more programs for use in processing a traffic flow in a communication network comprising a plurality of nodes, the one or more programs when executed in a processor implementing a method comprising the steps of:

splitting the traffic flow into a plurality of parts; and

distributing the parts to respective ones of the plurality of nodes that are designated as participating in a load balancing process for the traffic flow;

wherein each of at least a subset of the participating nodes receiving one of the parts routes at least a portion of its received part to one or more destination nodes of the plurality of nodes.