DCell-IP: DCell emboldened with IP address hierarchy for efficient routing

Abstract

The increasing complexity and sophistication of data center applications demands new features in the data center designs. With the deployment of large range of applications, there is a demand for low latency and high throughput from the underlying network infrastructure. This resulted in many Data Center Network (DCN) designs. There are class of designs for DCN called server-centric-networks, where routing is done by server rather than intermediate switches. BCube and DCell are two such designs. These designs use source routing for communication. The symmetry and hierarchy in their design enable source to compute the entire path to the destination. The current implementation of DCell uses addresses other than IP address for addressing the servers and switches. In this paper, we provide a new implementation for DCell called DCell-IP using IP address hierarchy. Since IP addresses are also symmetric and hierarchical, we eliminate the need for using new scheme for addressing servers and intermediate switches. This also eliminates the need for translating design specific addresses to IP addresses during the routing. © 2013 Springer.