Packet Transmission With LAG and Active-Standby Tunneling
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing network architectures face challenges in efficiently managing user-side links, particularly when elephant flows occur, leading to high load and affected transmission quality due to uneven traffic distribution and packet loss in user-plane devices.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a load balancing method using link aggregation groups (LAG) to bundle multiple physical links into a logical link, with a tunnel configured between active and standby forwarding devices to manage user traffic, ensuring packets are routed through the active device and minimizing packet loss.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If load balancing is implemented by connecting user terminals to different UP devices based on MAC address or session quantity, then user-side link utilization is improved, but packet loss occurs when elephant flows emerge causing extreme load on single links
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple physical user-side links into a logical link through link aggregation group (LAG) technology. This allows traffic from the same user terminal to be distributed across multiple physical links while maintaining logical link integrity, thereby improving link utilization without causing packet loss from uneven traffic distribution
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a tunnel as an intermediary mechanism between active and standby forwarding devices. The tunnel carries keepalive packets and traffic statistics information, enabling the standby device to monitor link status and take over when needed, thus preventing packet loss during load balancing operations
2Reliability
If traffic statistics collection and QoS processing are performed on all data packets, then transmission quality is maintained, but device complexity and processing overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies traffic statistics collection and QoS processing selectively rather than uniformly to all packets. The system identifies elephant flows through traffic statistics and applies QoS processing only to these specific flows, thereby maintaining transmission quality for critical traffic while reducing overall processing complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs traffic statistics collection on all packets but applies QoS processing only to identified elephant flows. This partial application of processing reduces overall device complexity while maintaining transmission quality for the most critical traffic patterns
Data Source
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AI summary
This application provides a packet transmission method, apparatus, and system, and relates to the field of network technologies, to improve utilization of a user-side link and reduce load on the user-side link. The method is applied to a network architecture including a user terminal, a first forwarding device and a second forwarding device. A tunnel is disposed between the first forwarding device and the second forwarding device. Packets of the user terminal are forwarded to the first forwarding device and the second forwarding device in a load balancing mode. The method includes: The first forwarding device receives packets forwarded by the user terminal in the load balancing mode, where the packets include a keepalive packet, and the first forwarding device is a standby forwarding device corresponding to the user terminal. The first forwarding device forwards the keepalive packet to the second forwarding device through the tunnel, where the second forwarding device is an active forwarding device corresponding to the user terminal.