New Techniques to Route in Folded-Clos Topology Data Center Networks

New architectures and topologies continue to be investigated to address the growing demands and challenges faced by Data Center Networks (DCN) - the communications backbone of the datacenter. We believe that novel techniques that leverage the high redundancy and symmetricity in DCN topologies can significantly simplify DCN protocols and operations and improve DCN performance. We adopted the folded-Clos topology to investigate a novel Multi-Root Meshed Tree Protocol (MR-MTP) and compared its performance to the popular protocol suite adopted in folded-Clos topologies, namely the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) with Equal Cost Multipath Protocol (ECMP) with and without Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD). We studied the convergence time, packet loss, control overhead and blast radius after an interface failure, introduced in multiple points. Our studies conducted on the FABRIC testbed provide strong validation that novel techniques that leverage the DCN structures can indeed simplify DCN protocol operations and improve performance.