A simple, cost-effective addressing and routing architecture for fat-tree based datacenter networks

Datacenter networks (DCNs) play an important role in supporting cloud computing and Internet-based services. The cost and power consumption of a DCN grow rapidly with the increases of network scale and bandwidth requirement. The cost, complexity and efficiency of a DCN are determined by several design factors including the topology, addressing and routing. In this paper, we propose a simple and cost-effective addressing and routing architecture for Fat-tree based DCNs. Firstly, a portbased source routing addressing (PA) scheme is proposed, which renders the table lookup operation unnecessary and can reduce the complexity of the switches. Secondly, targeting the widely used Fat-tree and combining the proposed addressing scheme, we design a simple routing mechanism without switch involvement, topology information storage and control message interaction. Finally, we present an efficient fault tolerance mechanism for the proposed architecture, leveraging the characteristics of PA and the regularity of Fat-tree topology. The analysis and simulation results show that our architecture can not only reduce the cost and power consumption of a DCN, but also improve the routing performance and deal with fault tolerance efficiently.