Traffic engineering for multiple spanning tree protocol in large data centers

The size of the capacity of data centers have been growing significantly during the last years. Most data centers rely on switched Ethernet networks. A drawback of the Ethernet technology is that it relies on the spanning tree protocol (or variants of it) to select the links that are used to forward packets inside the data center. In this paper we propose a Constrained-Based Local Search optimization scheme that is able to efficiently compute the optimum spanning tree in large data center networks. Our technique exploits the division of the data center network in VLANs. We evaluate its performance based on traffic matrices collected in data center networks and show good improvements compared to the standard spanning tree protocol with up to 16 VLANs.