Dandelion: A locally-high-performance and globally-high-scalability hierarchical data center network

The increasing customer demand is driving modern data centers to embrace the freely-expandable network architecture. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art freely-expandable networks suffer from either the large granularity of expansion or the prohibitive implementation cost. Furthermore, a recent research showed that data center traffic tends to be highly clustered. Based on above observations, this paper proposes a freely-expandable network architecture, namely the dandelion. Dandelion is a two-level hierarchical network, where the first level aims at “high performance” and the second level aims at “high scalability”. The resulting network has two distinct advantages. First, it could arbitrarily expand with a reasonable granularity. Second, the router architecture is efficient as well as highly scalable since 1) the routing table is significantly compressed and 2) a fixed number of virtual channels per physical channel are required regardless of the network size. Finally, the traffic characteristics of four typical cloud applications are analyzed, and the generated traffic patterns are used to evaluate the proposed network architecture. Simulation results prove that the dandelion is a promising network architecture for future data centers.