VLCcube: A VLC Enabled Hybrid Network Structure for Data Centers

Abstract

Recent results have made a promising case for offering oversubscribed wired data center networks (DCN) with extreme costs. Inter-rack wireless networks are drawing intensive attention to augment such wired DCNs with a few wireless links. Inspired by the promise of easy deployment and plug-and-play, we present VLCcube, a novel inter-rack wireless solution that extends the design of wireless DCN into three further dimensions: (1) all inter-rack links are wireless; (2) there is no imposition of any infrastructure-level alteration on wired production data centers; and (3) it should be plug-and-play, without any need of additional mechanical or electronic control operations. This vision, if realized, will lead to increased flexibility, reduced reconstructing cost, simplified configuration and usage, and outstanding compatibility with existing wired DCNs. Previous proposals, however, are opposed to the last two design rationales. To achieve this vision, the proposed VLCcube augments Fat-Tree, a representative DCN in production data centers, by organizing all racks into a wireless Torus structure via the emerging visible light links. We further present the topology design, hybrid routing, and flow scheduling schemes for VLCcube. Extensive evaluations indicate that VLCcube outperforms Fat-Tree significantly under the existing ECMP flow scheduling scheme, irrespective of the undergoing traffic pattern. Moreover, the performance of VLCcube can be significantly promoted by our congestion-aware flow scheduling scheme. More precisely, compared to ECMP, our flow scheduling scheme makes VLCcube achieve $\times 1.50$ throughput under batched flows, $\mathrm{\times}2.21$ and $\times 2.59$ throughput under two different kinds of online flows.