Efficient Event Scheduling of Network Update

Changes in network state are a common source of instability in networks. An update event typically involves multiple flows that compete for network resources at the cost of rescheduling and migrating some existing flows. Previous network updating schemes tackle such flows independently, rather than as the entity of an update event. They only optimize the flow-level metrics for the flows involved in an update event. In this paper, we present an event-level abstraction of network update that groups flows of an update event and schedules them together to minimize the event completion time (ECT). We then study the scheduling problem of multiple update events for achieving high scheduling efficiency and preserving fairness. The designed least migration traffic first (LMTF) method schedules all update events in the FIFO order, but it avoids head-of-line blocking by randomly fine-tuning the queue order of some events. It can considerably reduce the update cost, the average, and tail ECTs of update events. In addition, we design a general parallel-LMTF (P-LMTF) method to guarantee fairness and further improve scheduling efficiency among update events. This improves the LMTF method by opportunistically updating multiple events simultaneously. The comprehensive evaluation results indicate that the average ECT of our approach is up to $10 \times $ faster than the flow-level scheduling method for network update events, and its tail ECT is up to $6 \times $ faster. Our P-LMTF method incurs a 75% reduction in the average ECT compared with FIFO when the network utilization exceeds 70%, and it achieves a 42% reduction in tail ECT.