EtherProxy: Scaling Ethernet By Suppressing Broadcast Traffic

Abstract

Ethernet is the dominant technology for local area networks. This is mainly because of its autoconfiguration capability and its cost effectiveness. Unfortunately, a single Ethernet network can not scale to span a large enterprise network. A main reason for this is broadcast traffic resulting from many protocols running on top of Ethernet. This paper addresses Ethernet's scalability limits due to broadcast traffic. We studied and characterized broadcast traffic in Ethernet networks using traces collected from real networks. We found that broadcast is mainly used in Ethernet for service and resource discovery. For example, the address resolution protocol (ARP) uses broadcast to discover a MAC address that corresponds to an IP address. To avoid broadcast for service and resource discovery, we propose a new device, the EtherProxy. An EtherProxy uses caching to suppress broadcast traffic. EtherProxy is backward compatible and requires no changes to existing hardware, software, or protocols. Moreover, it requires no configuration. In our evaluation, we used real and synthetic workloads. Using both workloads, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the EtherProxy.