Research On Scalability And Multi-path Routing For Data Center Networks

Today’s data center is built on traditional network structures. As the numberof hosts grows larger, network becomes the bottleneck that decreases theperformance of applications running on data center. The limitations ofconventional network, such as resource fragmentation, lack of support for virtualmachine migration and inefficient data forwarding, gradually emerges. We need aredesign of the lower layer network to fundamentally solve these problems.In consideration of these limitations using conventional network in datacenter, we redesign a more suitable network structure for data center. We employ acentralized controller that maintains useful information (topology, host locationetc.). And the Spanning Tree Protocol is disabled to allow the existence of multipleredundant paths. Based on these predications, we apply a bandwidth-aware routingalgorithm that evenly distributes data stream among multiple available paths.Our design offers three advantages compared with the conventional network.First, we create a large broadcast domain that eliminates resource fragmentationand supports virtual machine migration better. Second, the new network structureis more scalable. Broadcast storm consumes much of available bandwidth usingconventional structure in large network. It’s no longer a problem when weeliminate unnecessary broadcast. Third, packet forwarding is more efficient usingour multi-path routing algorithm.