FTDC: A fault-tolerant server-centric data center network

Server-centric data center networks enable several important features of modern data center applications, such as cloud storage and big data processing. However, network failures are ubiquitous and significantly affect network performance, such as routing correctness and network bandwidth. Existing server-centric data centers do not provide specific fault-tolerance mechanisms to recover the network from failures and to protect network performance from downgrading. In this work, we design FTDC, a fault-tolerant network and its routing protocols. FTDC is developed to provide high-bandwidth and flexibility to data center applications and achieve fault tolerance in a self-fixing manner. Upon failures, the servers automatically explore valid paths to deliver packets to the destination by exchanging control messages among servers. Experimental results show that FTDC demonstrate high performance with very little extra overhead during network failures.