Wireless Facility Scheduling for Data Center Networks

The control packets in the Data Center Networks (DCNs) have to contest with the data packets although they are usually much shorter in size and much more important in network management. Moreover, the uneven distribution of the packets may create potential hotspots in the DCN which could degrade network performance drastically. To bridge these gaps, a few proposals have been put forward to construct extra wireless facilities in the DCNs to help promote the performance of the control traffic and relieve the burden of the hotspots. However, little attention has been paid on how to efficiently schedule the wireless facilities. In this paper, a scheduling method is put forward which contains two steps, i.e. route calculation and flow scheduling. In the former step, a route set between each node pair is calculated in advance for later usage. Then, arrived data and control flows are scheduled according to multiple policies based on the given route sets in the flow scheduling step. A series of experiments have been done on NS3 to evaluate the performance of various scheduling policies proposed based on different design requirements. The results have validated our scheduling method's effectiveness in typical DCN settings.