An SDN-Based Fabric for Flexible Data-Center Networks

Abstract

Data-centers play a fundamental role in cloud computing. As the market of cloud computing continues to scale, it becomes increasingly difficult to utilize resources in large data-center networks. There is a growing interest to seek for efficient data-center architectures among academia and industry. Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a promising technology to develop scalable network architectures for massive data processing. SDN decouples control planes from physical switches and centralizes network management. However, most of the previous works merging SDN with data-center networks use tree or fat-tree topologies. These topologies have fixed architectures and are difficult to make full use of the features supported by SDN. In this paper, we proposed a fabric topology to provide a flexible data-center network. With SDN controllers, our work has the potential to address critical issues such as bandwidth utilization and network capacity in datacenter networks.