Burst can be Harmless: Achieving Line-rate Software Traffic Shaping by Inter-flow Batching

Traffic shaping is a common function at end hosts. Compared with hardware ones, software shapers are more flexible to be developed and deployed, and thus are very attractive. Nevertheless, software approaches are still unsatisfactory as they struggle to saturate 40Gbps and higher speed.While much effort has been made to reduce the intrinsic overhead of software traffic shaping, we find that it is the extrinsic overhead, such as PCIe communications and interrupts, that hinders shaping from achieving 40Gbps - 100Gbps speed. Batching is an effective way to amortize these overheads. However, blindly batching can degrade the network performance, as it introduces bursts into the network. Diving into the dilemma, we find that intra-flow burst is to blame for harming the network performance, while inter-flow burst, consisting of packets from different flows, can be naturally demultiplexed in the network.Based on the insight, we present FlowBundler, which can achieve efficient traffic shaping by inter-flow batching. Testbed experiments show that FlowBundler can achieve an accurate shaping of 98Gbps with a single CPU core, which is 2.6× better than state-of-the-art approaches. Large-scale simulations show that FlowBundler can batch packet transmissions without harming the network performance.