METTEOR: Robust Multi-Traffic Topology Engineering for Commercial Data Center Networks

TL;DR

METTEOR is a practical topology design method for optical data center networks that reduces reconfiguration needs and improves traffic handling by leveraging traffic predictions, achieving near-optimal bandwidth utilization with less complexity.

Contribution

METTEOR introduces a deployable topology design approach that minimizes reconfigurations and handles bursty traffic effectively using predicted traffic matrices.

Findings

Increases direct-hop traffic by 80% over fat tree architectures.

Achieves close-to-optimal bandwidth utilization with biweekly reconfiguration.

Reduces control plane complexity compared to frequent reconfiguration methods.

Abstract

Numerous optical circuit switched data center networks have been proposed over the past decade for higher capacity, though commercial adoption of these architectures have been minimal so far. One major challenge commonly facing these architectures is the difficulty of handling bursty traffic with optical circuit switches (OCS) with high switching latency. Prior works generally rely on fast-switching OCS prototypes to better react to traffic changes via frequent reconfigurations. This approach, unfortunately, adds further complexity to the control plane. We propose METTEOR, an easily deployable solution for optical circuit switched data centers, that is designed for the current capabilities of commercial OCSs. Using multiple predicted traffic matrices, METTEOR designs data center topologies that are less sensitive to traffic changes, thus eliminating the need of frequently reconfiguring OCSs upon traffic changes. Results based on extensive evaluations using production traces show that METTEOR increases the percentage of direct-hop traffic by about 80% over a fat tree at comparable cost, and by about 30% over a uniform mesh, at comparable maximum link utilizations. Compared to ideal solutions that reconfigure OCSs on every traffic matrix, METTEOR achieves close-to-optimal bandwidth utilization even with biweekly reconfiguration. This drastically lowers the controller and management complexity needed to perform METTEOR in commercial settings.