Benefits of programmable topological routing policies in RINA-enabled large-scale datacenters

Abstract

With the proliferation of cloud computing and the expected requirements of future Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G network scenarios, more efficient and scalable Data Centers (DCs) will be required, offering very large pools of computational resources and storage capacity cost-effectively. Looking at todays' commercial DCs, they tend to rely on well-defined leaf-spine Data Center Network (DCN) topologies that not only offer low latency and high bisectional bandwidth, but also enhanced reliability against multiple failures. However, routing and forwarding solutions in such DCNs are typically based on IP, thus suffering from its limited routing scalability. In this work, we quantitatively evaluate the benefits that the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) can bring into commercial DCNs. To this goal, we propose rule-based topological routing and forwarding policies tailored to the characteristics of publicly available Google's and Facebook's DCNs. These policies can be programmed in a RINA-enabled environment, enabling fast forwarding decisions in most scenarios with merely neighboring node information. Upon DCN failures, invalid forwarding rules are overwritten by exceptions. Numerical results show that the scalability of our proposal depends on the number of concurrent failures in the DCN rather than its size (e.g., number of nodes/links), dramatically reducing the total amount of routing and forwarding information to be stored at nodes. Furthermore, as routing information is only disseminated upon failures across the DCN, the associated communication cost of our proposals largely outperforms that of the traditional IP-based solutions.