Datacenter in the City: An overlay network for serving intra-city traffic between “metro islands”

The computing and networking infrastructures that operate inside the city boundaries have started to attract the academia’s and industry’s attention. It gets obvious that the future applications’ requirements can only be served if processing and storage is performed locally, which will increase the number of traffic flows between communicating parties that lie inside the city. Furthermore “local” mini-data centers are placed closer to the user. However, modifications to the current metropolitan network architecture, which is organized into “metro islands” that consist of access and metro segments, and the respective resource allocation mechanisms are required. In this work, we propose the Datacenter in the City architecture to serve the intra-city traffic. The proposed solution makes use of an overlay network with pre-reserved capacity that operates on top of the “ metro islands” to serve the high priority traffic in a way similar to the way bypasses or highways are used to decrease traffic congestion in the city center. The proposed architecture is viewed both from technological and from design and operation aspects. A resource allocation mechanism is presented that decides on the traffic and the respective workload that will be served locally withing the “metro islands” or that will utilize the overlay network so as to be served by other computing and storage facilities inside the same city.