Sarhan M. Musa, Nader F. Mir, Avanish Gupta, Shakun Rajan Yawatkar, Anam Khan and Sravani Chavali
Widespread deployment of network virtualization technology in ever-growing Enterprise, Data center and service provider network, brings about its own set of problems. The concept of LAG aims to overcome some of the problems such as IP address exhaustion, limited link bandwidth, bottleneck links, Level-3 routing and lack of resilience. There are two main protocols for LAG, Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) and Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP). Both these protocols are used widely in networking industry. LACP is an IEEE standard while PAgP is Cisco Proprietary protocol. This paper presents implementation, simulation and testing the performance of Link Aggregation (LAG) protocols applied on data center networks. Also, we show the performance analysis of each protocol separately for LAG considering various factors such as file transfer rate, number of parallel connections and link overloading. Apart from individual analysis of LACP and PAgP, a brief comparative analysis of these two protocols is presented.
Link Aggregation, Link Virtualization, Port Aggregation