Optimized wireless channel allocation in hybrid data center network based on IEEE 802.11ad

Abstract

The massive adoption of Cloud services is entailing a tremendous traffic transiting over data center networks (DCNs). Despite the impressive wired throughput, DCNs are suffering from network congestion. To deal with such resource limitation, first, we put forward a novel Hybrid Data Center Network (HDCN) architecture, based on CISCO’s Massively Scalable Data Center (MSDC) model. HDCN enables high throughput wireless (IEEE 802.11ad) and wired (IEEE 802.3) transmissions. Second, we focus on one-hop inter-rack communications in HDCN and propose a novel wireless channel assignment algorithm. Our goal is to maximize the total throughput over the wireless and/or wired infrastructure. We formulate the problem as a minimum graph coloring. To address this NP-hard problem, we propound two novel i) exact and ii) heuristic wireless channel assignment algorithms in HDCN denoted respectively by GC-HDCN and GH-GC-HDCN. The latter make use of i) column generation and ii) branch and price optimization schemes to resolve the Integer Linear Programming assignment problem while reducing computation time. Based on extensive simulations with QualNet simulator considering the full network protocol stack, the results obtained for both: i) uniform and ii) real Facebook’s workload, show that our proposals outperform the related prominent strategies in terms of latency and throughput.