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Rethinking the architecture design of data center networks

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Abstract

In the rising tide of the Internet of things, more and more things in the world are connected to the Internet. Recently, data have kept growing at a rate more than four times of that expected in Moore’s law. This explosion of data comes from various sources such as mobile phones, video cameras and sensor networks, which often present multidimensional characteristics. The huge amount of data brings many challenges on the management, transportation, and processing IT infrastructures. To address these challenges, the state-of-art large scale data center networks have begun to provide cloud services that are increasingly prevalent. However, how to build a good data center remains an open challenge. Concurrently, the architecture design, which significantly affects the total performance, is of great research interest. This paper surveys advances in data center network design. In this paper we first introduce the upcoming trends in the data center industry. Then we review some popular design principles for today’s data center network architectures. In the third part, we present some up-to-date data center frameworks and make a comprehensive comparison of them. During the comparison, we observe that there is no so-called optimal data center and the design should be different referring to the data placement, replication, processing, and query processing. After that, several existing challenges and limitations are discussed. According to these observations, we point out some possible future research directions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Research Center of Digital Life, State-Province Joint Laboratory of Digital Home Interactive Applications, School of Physics and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Kaishun Wu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    Kaishun Wu, Jiang Xiao & Lionel M. Ni

Authors
  1. Kaishun Wu
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  2. Jiang Xiao
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  3. Lionel M. Ni
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Correspondence to Kaishun Wu.

Additional information

Kaishun Wu is currently a research assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He received PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from HKUST in 2011. He received his BE degree from Sun Yat-sen University in 2007. His research interests include wireless communications, mobile computing, wireless sensor networks, and data center networks.

Jiang Xiao is a first year PhD student in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests focus on wireless indoor localization systems, wireless sensor networks, and data center networks.

Lionel M. Ni is a chair professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST. He also serves as the special assistant to the president of HKUST, he is the dean of HKUST Fok Ying Tung Graduate School and visiting chair professor of Shanghai Key Lab of Scalable Computing and Systems at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A fellow of IEEE, Prof. Ni has chaired over 30 professional conferences and has received six awards for authoring outstanding papers.

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Wu, K., Xiao, J. & Ni, L.M. Rethinking the architecture design of data center networks. Front. Comput. Sci. 6, 596–603 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-012-1155-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-012-1155-6

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