Generalized DCell structure for load-balanced data center networks

Abstract

DCell [3] has been proposed as a server centric network structure for data centers. DCell can support millions of servers with high network capacity and provide good fault tolerance by only using commodity mini-switches. However, the traffic in DCell is imbalanced in that links at different layers carry very different number of flows. In this paper, we present a generalized DCell framework so that structures with different connecting rules can be constructed.We show that these structures still preserve the desirable properties of the original DCell structure. Furthermore, we show that the new structures are more symmetric and provide much better load-balancing when using shortest-path routing. We demonstrate the load-balancing property of the new structures by extensive simulations.