A Survey and Evaluation of Data Center Network Topologies

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey and evaluation of various data center network topologies, analyzing their performance using simulations to inform optimal design choices.

Contribution

It offers a detailed taxonomy of existing and proposed data center network topologies along with comparative performance analysis using simulation tools.

Findings

Different topologies exhibit varying throughput and latency characteristics.

Simulation results highlight trade-offs between bisection bandwidth and latency.

The survey identifies promising topologies for specific data center requirements.

Abstract

Data centers are becoming increasingly popular for their flexibility and processing capabilities in the modern computing environment. They are managed by a single entity (administrator) and allow dynamic resource provisioning, performance optimization as well as efficient utilization of available resources. Each data center consists of massive compute, network and storage resources connected with physical wires. The large scale nature of data centers requires careful planning of compute, storage, network nodes, interconnection as well as inter-communication for their effective and efficient operations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of network topologies either used in commercial data centers, or proposed by researchers working in this space. We also compare and evaluate some of those topologies using mininet as well as gem5 simulator for different traffic patterns, based on various metrics including throughput, latency and bisection bandwidth.