Space Shuffle: A Scalable, Flexible, and High-Bandwidth Data Center Network

TL;DR

Space Shuffle (S2) is a novel data center network architecture that uses greedy routing on multiple ring spaces to achieve high scalability, bandwidth, and flexibility, overcoming limitations of traditional rigid topologies.

Contribution

The paper introduces Space Shuffle, a flexible, scalable data center network architecture employing greedy routing on multiple ring spaces, enabling efficient, high-bandwidth, and resilient network operations.

Findings

High bisectional bandwidth and throughput

Near-optimal routing path lengths

Small forwarding state and high resiliency

Abstract

Data center applications require the network to be scalable and bandwidth-rich. Current data center network architectures often use rigid topologies to increase network bandwidth. A major limitation is that they can hardly support incremental network growth. Recent work proposes to use random interconnects to provide growth flexibility. However routing on a random topology suffers from control and data plane scalability problems, because routing decisions require global information and forwarding state cannot be aggregated. In this paper we design a novel flexible data center network architecture, Space Shuffle (S2), which applies greedy routing on multiple ring spaces to achieve high-throughput, scalability, and flexibility. The proposed greedy routing protocol of S2 effectively exploits the path diversity of densely connected topologies and enables key-based routing. Extensive experimental studies show that S2 provides high bisectional bandwidth and throughput, near-optimal routing path lengths, extremely small forwarding state, fairness among concurrent data flows, and resiliency to network failures.