Abstract
Recent results have made a promising case for offering oversubscribed wired data center networks (DCN) with extreme costs. Inter-rack wireless networks are drawing intensive attention to augment such wired DCNs with a few wireless links. For this reason, we propose a hybrid network topology, VLCcube, which consists of wireless links and wired links, by introducing extra visible light communication (VLC) links into data centers. Specifically, VLCcube augments Fat-Tree, a representative DCN in production data centers, by installing 4 VLC transceivers on top of each rack for constructing four wireless links of 10 Gbps. These wireless links improve the network capacity of wired links and organize all racks into a wireless Torus structure. This chapter focuses on the topology design, hybrid routing, and flow scheduling schemes for VLCcube, and carries out related experiments to show its performance. VLCcube has better network performance than Fat-Tree since many flows transmitting along 4-hop paths in Fat-Tree can achieve a shorter transmission range if they are transmitted in the wireless Torus. The congestion-aware flow scheduling algorithm can further improve the performance of VLCcube. Actually, VLCcube is just one alternative to the utilization of VLC links in data centers. The introduction of VLC links integrates seamlessly with the existing DCNs, and it improves the performance and design flexibility of DCNs effectively.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Al-Fares M, Loukissas A, Vahdat A. A scalable, commodity data center network architecture [J]. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2008, 38(4): 63–74.
Greenberg A, Hamilton J R, Jain N, et al. VL2: a scalable and flexible data center network [J]. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2009, 39(4): 51–62.
Hamedazimi N, Qazi Z, Gupta H, et al. FireFly: a reconfigurable wireless data center fabric using free-space optics [C]. In Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, Chicago, USA, 2014: 319–330.
Zhou X, Zhang Z, Zhu Y, et al. Mirror mirror on the ceiling: Flexible wireless links for data centers [J]. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2012, 42(4): 443–454.
Cui Y, Wang H, Cheng X, et al. Wireless data center networking [J]. IEEE Wireless Communications, 2011, 18(6): 46–53.
Shin J Y, Sirer E G, Weatherspoon H, et al. On the feasibility of completely wirelesss datacenters [J]. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2013, 21(5): 1666–1679.
Guo C, Lu G, Li D, et al. BCube: a high performance, server-centric network architecture for modular data centers [J]. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2009, 39(4): 63–74.
Guo C, Wu H, Tan K, et al. Dcell: a scalable and fault-tolerant network structure for data centers [J]. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2008, 38(4): 75–86.
Singla A, Hong C Y, Popa L, et al. Jellyfish: Networking Data Centers Randomly [C]. In Proc. of 9th USENIX NSDI, Boston, USA, 2011: 17–17.
Shin J Y, Wong B, Sirer E G. Small-world datacenters [C]. In Proc. of 2nd ACM SOCC, Cascais, Portugal, 2011: 1–13.
Zhang W, Zhou X, Yang L, et al. 3D beamforming for wireless data centers [C]. In Proc. of 10th ACM HotNets, Cambridge, UK, 2011: 1–6.
Haas H. Light fidelity (Li-Fi): towards all-optical networking [C]. In Proc. of SPIE International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2013: 9007(5): 900702-900702-10.
Tsonev D, Chun H, Rajbhandari S, et al. A 3-Gb/s Single-LED OFDM-Based Wireless VLC Link Using a Gallium Nitride [J]. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 2014, 26(7): 637–640.
Chi Y, Hsieh D, Tsai C, et al. 450-nm GaN laser diode enables high-speed visible light communication with 9-Gbps QAM-OFDM [J]. Optics Express, 2015, 23(10): 13051–13059.
Ronja [EB/OL]. [2016-01-18]. http://ronja.twibright.com.
Singh S, Bharti R. 163m/10Gbps 4QAM-OFDM visible light communication [J]. IJETR, 2014, 2: 225–228.
PureLiFi [EB/OL]. [2016-01-18]. http://purelifi.com/lifi-products/li-1st/.
TracePro, http://www.lambdares.com/, 2015.
Han K, Hu Z, Luo J, et al. RUSH: RoUting and Scheduling for Hybrid Data Center Networks [C]. In Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, Hongkong, China, 2015.
Chen Y, Jain S, Adhikari V K, et al. A first look at inter-data center traffic characteristics via yahoo! Datasets [J]. IEEE INFOCOM Proceedings, 2011, 2(3): 1620–1628.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Guo, D. (2022). VLCcube: A Network Topology for VLC Enabled Wireless Data Centers. In: Data Center Networking. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9368-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9368-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-16-9367-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-16-9368-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)