Rethinking the Data Center Networking: Architecture, Network Protocols, and Resource Sharing

TLDR

Large‑scale data centers underpin cloud computing, but the exponential growth of servers creates significant challenges for efficient, cost‑effective networking, data availability, and security, prompting a surge of innovative research. This paper investigates data center networks by offering a comprehensive overview and analysis of literature on interconnection architectures, network protocols, and resource sharing in multitenant cloud environments. The authors first outline DCN requirements and design principles, then systematically review research across the identified topics. The study concludes with a synthesis of the surveyed work, highlighting key insights and suggesting directions for future research.

Abstract

Large-scale data centers enable the new era of cloud computing and provide the core infrastructure to meet the computing and storage requirements for both enterprise information technology needs and cloud-based services. To support the ever-growing cloud computing needs, the number of servers in today's data centers are increasing exponentially, which in turn leads to enormous challenges in designing an efficient and cost-effective data center network. With data availability and security at stake, the issues with data center networks are more critical than ever. Motivated by these challenges and critical issues, many novel and creative research works have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we investigate in data center networks and provide a general overview and analysis of the literature covering various research areas, including data center network interconnection architectures, network protocols for data center networks, and network resource sharing in multitenant cloud data centers. We start with an overview on data center networks and together with its requirements navigate the data center network designs. We then present the research literature related to the aforementioned research topics in the subsequent sections. Finally, we draw the conclusions.