Performance Evaluation of a Power-Efficient and Robust 60 GHz Wireless Server-to-Server Datacenter Network

Abstract

Datacenters have become the digital backbone of the modern world. To support the growing demands on bandwidth, datacenter networks (DCNs) consume an increasing amount of power. Additionally, the complex cabling in traditional datacenters poses design and maintenance challenges and increases the energy cost of the cooling infrastructure by obstructing the flow of chilled air. In this paper, we present a wireless server-to-server datacenter network architecture using millimeter-wave links to eliminate the need for power-hungry switching fabric of traditional fat-tree based datacenter networks. The server-to-server wireless datacenter network (S2S-WiDCN) architecture requires line-of-sight (LoS) between servers to establish direct communication links. However, in the presence of an obstruction such as an IT technician, the LoS may be blocked. To address this issue, we propose a novel obstruction-aware adaptive routing algorithm for S2S-WiDCN. We evaluate the performance of S2S-WiDCN in terms of traffic flow completion duration and throughput, with different kinds of datacenter traffic as well as in presence of obstruction to LoS links. We also compare the performance and power efficiency of S2S-WiDCN with the traditional fat tree DCN as well as a top-of-rack (ToR)-to-ToR wireless DCN.