Compared to traditional ECMP and Hedera, Sonum can significantly improve network throughput, flow completion time and link utilization. Sonum is expected to be used in data center network management with the result of increasing data center revenue and improving user experience.

Long flow detection and load balancing are crucial techniques for data center running and management. However, both of them have been independently studied in previous studies. In this paper, we propose a complete solution called Sonum, which can complete long flow detection and scheduling at the same time. Sonum consists of a software-defined synergetic sampling approach and an optimal network utilization mechanism. Sonum detects long flows through consolidating and processing sampling information from multiple switches. Compared with the existing prime solution, the missed detection rate of Sonum is reduced by 2.3%–5.1%. After obtaining the long flow information, Sonum minimizes the potential packet loss rate as the optimization target and then translates load balancing into an optimization problem of arranging a minimum packet loss path for long flows. This paper also introduces a heuristic algorithm for solving this optimization problem. The experimental results show that Sonum outperforms ECMP and Hedera in terms of network throughput and flow completion time.