Steroid OpenFlow Service: A Scalable, Cloud-Based Data Transfer Solution

With the recent rise in cloud computing, applications are routinely accessing and interacting with data on remote resources. As data sizes become increasingly large, often combined with their locations being far from the applications, the well known impact of lower TCP throughput over large delay-bandwidth product paths becomes more significant to these applications. While myriads of solutions exist to alleviate the problem, they require specialized software at both the application host and the remote data server, making it hard to scale up to a large range of applications and execution environments. A software defined networking based solution called Steroid OpenFlow Service (SOS) has been proposed as a network service that transparently increases the throughput of data transfers across large networks. In this paper, the SOS architecture is refined to support data transfer at scale. In an OpenFlow-based cloud environment such as GENI, SOS can leverage the use of multiple agents to provide increased network throughput for many applications simultaneously. A cloud-based approach is particularly beneficial to applications in environments without access to high performance networks. This paper introduces the scalable SOS architecture and demonstrates its viability and scalability in GENI's distributed testbed.