Multi-objective traffic engineering for data center networks

Data centers are now the basis for many Internet and cloud computing services. The Spanning Tree Protocol and its variants have been widely used in data center networks for a couple of decades. An efficient use of the limited spanning tree links would enable to solve the traffic engineering problem in data centers. In this paper, we propose five local search approaches for generating a good set of spanning trees in data centers using multiple VLANs. The quality of these algorithms is evaluated by different multi-criteria assessment methods. The performance of each algorithm is assessed based on three standard measures: maximal link utilization, sum load, and the number of used links.