Space Shuffle: A Scalable, Flexible, and High-Bandwidth Data Center Network

Abstract

Data center applications require the network to be scalable and bandwidth-rich. Current data center network architectures often use rigid topologies to increase network bandwidth. A major limitation is that they can hardly support incremental network growth. Recent studies propose to use random interconnects to provide growth flexibility. However, routing on a random topology suffers from control and data plane scalability problems, because routing decisions require global information and forwarding state cannot be aggregated. In this paper, we design a novel flexible data center network architecture, Space Shuffle (S2), which applies greedy routing on multiple ring spaces to achieve high-throughput, scalability, and flexibility. The proposed greedy routing protocol of S2 effectively exploits the path diversity of densely connected topologies and enables key-based routing. Extensive experimental studies show that S2 provides high bisectional bandwidth and throughput, near-optimal routing path lengths, extremely small forwarding state, fairness among concurrent data flows, and resiliency to network failures.