A Multipath Controller for Accelerating GridFTP Transfer over SDN

Abstract

A large amount of scientific data needs to be transferred from one site to another as fast as possible in the computational science fields. High-speed data transfer between sites is very important, especially in the Grid computing field, GridFTP has been widely used for bulk data transfer over a wide area network. GridFTP achieves greater performance by supporting parallel TCP streams. Using parallel TCP streams improves the throughput of slow-start algorithms and lossy networks even on a single path. This research proposes a traffic engineering technique that increases the data transfer performance by using multiple paths simultaneously for the parallel TCP streams. For this purpose, we use Software-Defined Network (SDN) technology and its implementation, OpenFlow. This paper presents the design and implementation of the proposed system. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that our proposed system can accelerate GridFTP Transfer in both virtual and real global-scale environments.