STAC: Simultaneous Transmitting and Air Computing in Wireless Data Center Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces STAC, a novel physical layer scheme for wireless data center networks that enables simultaneous transmission and in-air computation, significantly improving bandwidth and energy efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new physical layer scheme called STAC that leverages electromagnetic wave superposition for simultaneous transmission and computation in wireless DCNs.

Findings

Bandwidth efficiency improved severalfold

Energy efficiency improved severalfold

Theoretical analysis and simulations validate performance gains

Abstract

The data center network (DCN), wired or wireless, features large amounts of Many-to-One (M2O) sessions. Each M2O session is currently operated based on Point-to-Point (P2P) communications and Store-and-Forward (SAF) relays, and is generally followed by certain further computation at the destination. %typically a weighted summation of the received digits. Different from this separate P2P/SAF-based-transmission and computation strategy, this paper proposes STAC, a novel physical layer scheme that achieves Simultaneous Transmission and Air Computation in wireless DCNs. In particular, STAC takes advantage of the superposition nature of electromagnetic (EM) waves, and allows multiple transmitters to transmit in the same time slot with appropriately chosen parameters, such that the received superimposed signal can be directly transformed to the needed summation at the receiver. Exploiting the static channel environment and compact space in DCN, we propose an enhanced Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture to enable STAC, where wired connections are established to provide the wireless transceivers external reference signals. Theoretical analysis and simulation show that with STAC used, both the bandwidth and energy efficiencies can be improved severalfold.