HONE: Joint Host-Network Traffic Management in Software-Defined Networks

Applications running in modern datacenters interact with the underlying network in complex ways, making administrators run multiple traffic management tasks to tune the system. However, today’s traffic management solutions are limited by an artificial division between the hosts and the network. While network devices only have knowledge of the network layer, the hosts can provide more visibility into how applications interact with the network. This paper proposes to extend the scope of traffic management to the end-host network stack. We present a software-defined networking platform for joint HOst-NEtwork (HONE) traffic management. HONE presents a uniform view of a diverse collection of measurement data, minimizes measurement overhead by performing lazy materialization of fine-grained statistics, and scales the analysis by processing data locally on the end hosts. HONE offers a simple and expressive programming framework for network and service administrators. We evaluate HONE by implementing several canonical traffic management applications, measuring its efficiency with micro-benchmarks, and demonstrating its scalability with larger experiments on Amazon EC2.