Kevin: de Bruijn-based topology with demand-aware links and greedy routing

TL;DR

Kevin introduces a demand-aware, reconfigurable datacenter network using a de Bruijn topology, enabling efficient multi-hop greedy routing with minimal control overhead and dynamic link reconfiguration.

Contribution

It presents a novel de Bruijn-based topology with demand-aware links and a simple greedy routing scheme, improving network capacity and adaptability in datacenter environments.

Findings

Supports integrated multi-hop routing

Uses small forwarding tables for local greedy routing

Enables dynamic reconfiguration with minimal control updates

Abstract

We propose Kevin, a novel demand-aware reconfigurable rack-to-rack datacenter network realized with a simple and efficient control plane. In particular, Kevin makes effective use of the network capacity by supporting integrated and multi-hop routing as well as work-conserving scheduling. To this end, Kevin relies on local greedy routing with small forwarding tables which require local updates only during topological reconfigurations, making this approach ideal for dynamic networks. Specifically, Kevin is based on a de Bruijn topology (using a small number of optical circuit switches) in which static links are enhanced with opportunistic links.