Design of Disaster-Resilient Optical Datacenter Networks

Abstract

Survivability against disasters-both natural and deliberate attacks, and spanning large geographical areas-is becoming a major challenge in communication networks. Cloud services delivered by datacenter networks yield new opportunities to provide protection against disasters. Cloud services require a network substrate with high capacity, low latency, high availability, and low cost, which can be delivered by optical networks. In such networks, path protection against network failures is generally ensured by providing a backup path to the same destination (i.e., a datacenter), which is link-disjoint to the primary path. This protection fails to protect against disasters covering an area which disrupts both primary and backup paths. Also, protection against destination (datacenter) node failure is not ensured by a generic protection scheme. Moreover, content/service protection is a fundamental problem in a datacenter network, as the failure of a datacenter should not cause the disappearance of a specific content/service from the network. So content placement, routing, and protection of paths and content should be addressed together. In this work, we propose an integrated Integer Linear Program (ILP) to design an optical datacenter network, which solves the above-mentioned problems simultaneously. We show that our disaster protection scheme exploiting anycasting provides more protection, but uses less capacity than dedicated single-link failure protection. We show that a reasonable number of datacenters and selective content replicas with intelligent network design can provide survivability to disasters while supporting user demands. We also propose ILP relaxations and heuristics to solve the problem for large networks.