A Survey and Evaluation of Data Center Network Topologies

Abstract: Data centers are becoming increasingly popular for their flexibility and processing capabilities in the modern computing environment. They are managed by a single entity (administrator) and allow dynamic resource provisioning, performance optimization as well as efficient utilization of available resources. Each data center consists of massive compute, network and storage resources connected with physical wires. The large scale nature of data centers requires careful planning of compute, storage, network nodes, interconnection as well as inter-communication for their effective and efficient operations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of network topologies either used in commercial data centers, or proposed by researchers working in this space. We also compare and evaluate some of those topologies using mininet as well as gem5 simulator for different traffic patterns, based on various metrics including throughput, latency and bisection bandwidth.