A RoCEv2 Flow-Level Load Balancing Method Based on the IPv6 Flow Label
draft-hu-v6ops-ipv6-flowlabel-load-balancing-rdma-00
| Document | Type |
Replaced Internet-Draft
(individual)
Expired & archived
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Authors | Jiayuan Hu , Xia Gong | ||
| Last updated | 2026-05-24 | ||
| Replaced by | draft-hu-6man-ipv6-flowlabel-load-balancing-rdma | ||
| RFC stream | (None) | ||
| Intended RFC status | (None) | ||
| Formats | |||
| Stream | Stream state | (No stream defined) | |
| Consensus boilerplate | Unknown | ||
| RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
| IESG | IESG state | Replaced by draft-hu-6man-ipv6-flowlabel-load-balancing-rdma | |
| Telechat date | (None) | ||
| Responsible AD | (None) | ||
| Send notices to | (None) |
This Internet-Draft is no longer active. A copy of the expired Internet-Draft is available in these formats:
Abstract
This document proposes a method for achieving flow-level load balancing in RoCEv2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet version 2) networks. Traditional per-flow load balancing based on the 5-tuple cannot distinguish between different RDMA sessions that share the same 5-tuple. This causes "elephant flows" to be hashed to the same path, leading to network congestion. This method resolves this issue by parsing the QP (Queue Pair) information from the IB BTH (Base Transport Header) and IB DETH (Datagram Extended Transport Header) headers of the RoCEv2 packet. By combining this with portions of the IPv6 source and destination addresses as an entropy source, a CRC32 hash algorithm generates a 20-bit value, which is then written into the Flow Label field of the IPv6 header. Network devices can subsequently use the updated "5-tuple + Flow Label" for more granular flow-level load balancing, thereby effectively improving transmission efficiency in high-performance networks such as AI computing.
Authors
(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)