ARK: Avoiding Routing Collisions for KV Cache Transfer in Disaggregated LLM Inference
TL;DR
This work presents ARK, a distributed elephant-flow path reservation mechanism that coordinates senders to choose source ports whose hashes map concurrent flows onto distinct spines, without requiring switch changes or receiver-side packet reordering.
Abstract
Disaggregated LLM inference separates the prefill and decode phases across GPU pools, generating massive KV-cache transfers. Because these transfers last hundreds of milliseconds to seconds, they behave as mega elephant flows that dominate link bandwidth utilization. In this regime, stateless ECMP can perform poorly: hash collisions may overload one spine link while leaving others idle, stretching transfer times by seconds. Yet this same persistence makes coordination practical. Since these flows are long-lived, even lightweight one-to-all coordination can be amortized over their lifetime. We present ARK, a distributed elephant-flow path reservation mechanism. ARK coordinates senders to choose source ports whose hashes map concurrent flows onto distinct spines, without requiring switch changes or receiver-side packet reordering. Packet-level RDMA simulations show that ARK reduces mean and P95 FCT by up to 27.3% and 34.0% under moderate load, and further reduces mean TTFT by up to 12.9%.