Wireless link scheduling for data center networks

Abstract

Data Center Networks (DCNs) suffer from the congestions caused by unbalanced traffic distributions. Nevertheless, it is difficult to address such a challenge with the existent Ethernet-based DCN architecture. Wireless networking has been considered as a viable approach with a high potential to tackle the problem due to its flexibility. This paper presents Wireless Link Scheduling for Data Center Networks (WLS-DCN) to provide a feasible wireless DCN. More specifically, we propose a wireless DCN architecture as well as a scheduling mechanism. In our wireless scheduling, two different optimization objectives are considered, with one targeting the unbalanced traffic distribution and one maximizing the total network utility, under the constraints of limited wireless resources and co-channel interference. We propose two heuristics for the two problems and carry out extensive simulation study to validate the performance of our design. Our results demonstrate that WLSDCN can significantly improve the performance of DCN.