Modern datacenter networks rely on multi-root tree topologies, to ensure efficient and reliable connectivity. However, traditional traffic engineering solutions like Equal Cost Multiple Path (ECMP) and Weighted-Cost MultiPath (WCMP) often fall short in addressing dynamic and heterogeneous traffic conditions. Specifically, these approaches struggle with asymmetric topologies and the allocation of elephant flows, which require more granular and agile traffic management. This paper introduces MTS-PolKA, a novel traffic splitting mechanism designed to enhance traffic engineering in datacenter networks. MTS-PolKA enables packet-level traffic distribution across multiple paths by embedding a label in the packet header that dictates the traffic division profile. Unlike existing methods that require reconfiguration of network tables at each switch, MTS-PolKA allows for dynamic and simultaneous adjustments across all switches in the path through simple modifications to the packet header. This approach significantly improves the agility and efficiency of traffic management. The implementation of MTS-PolKA on programmable switches using the P4 language, leveraging the Residue Number System (RNS) and M-PolKA architecture, demonstrates its potential through experiments conducted in the Mininet emulator. The results highlight the ability of MTS-PolKA to maintain flow stability, explore network multipaths, and enable rapid reconfigurations of traffic division profiles, enhancing the performance and efficiency of modern datacenter networks.

The paper is under final review on IEEE Transaction on Network and Service Management. Innovative traffic engineering functions and services require disrupting routing and forwarding mechanisms to be performed with low overhead over complex network topologies. Source routing (SR) is a prominent alternative to table-based routing for providing the needed expressiveness and agility by reducing the number of network states. This work proposes the M-PolKA, a topology-agnostic multipath source routing scheme and orchestration architecture for reliable communications, which explores special properties from the Residue Number System (RNS) polynomial arithmetic. A P4-based proof-of-concept is experimentally demonstrated using emulated and hardware prototypes. Also, use cases for revealing M-PolKA’s functionalities are tested in different scenarios in order to address problems, such as communication reliability improvement, agile path migration and fast failure reaction. Finally, low overhead for extra functionalities is observed when RNS-based SR is compared to traditional routing approaches.