Failure-Resilient Routing for Server-Centric Data Center Networks with Random Topologies

Data center networks with random topologies provide several promising features, such as near-optimal bisection bandwidth and flexibility of incremental growth. However, network failures are ubiquitous and significantly affect the performance of cloud services, such as availability and bandwidth. Existing random topology based 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 nodes automatically explore valid paths to deliver packets to the destination by exchanging control packets. FTDC is a generalized solution that can be applied to multiple existing data center topologies. Experimental results show that FTDC demonstrates high performance with very little extra overhead during network failures.