Fly-path: Traffic-based multi-hop routing approach for hybrid wireless data centers

High data transfer rates achieved by 802.11ad at 60 GHz ISM band enables use of wireless communication in data centers. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of offloading traffic from wired to wireless network in hybrid data centers. By understanding the capabilities of the wireless network, we can design the hybrid data center network accordingly, to achieve better construction and operating efficiency. First, we propose a system model in which each top-of-the-rack switch is equipped with two radios, so that three non-overlapping channels of 802.11ad that are available worldwide can be assigned in an interference-free manner to any configuration of wireless links. Then, we propose multi-hop routing algorithms that assign traffic to wireless infrastructure. These algorithms consist of two families. SP family of algorithms route traffic only over shortest-paths between source and destination pairs. LP algorithms relax this restriction and assign traffic to longer paths when necessary. In order to evaluate the performance of our routing algorithms, we also propose a random data center traffic generation method, based on an analysis of a real-world data center traffic pattern. We evaluate the performance of our allocation methods in terms of different metrics for various network sizes. Results show that our methods can offload significant amount of traffic from wired to wireless network, can achieve quite high throughput, and can utilize wireless links very well.