D3: An Adaptive Reconfigurable Datacenter Network

Abstract: The explosively growing communication traffic in datacenters imposes increasingly stringent performance requirements on the underlying networks. Over the last years, researchers have developed innovative optical switching technologies that enable reconfigurable datacenter networks (RCDNs) which support very fast topology reconfigurations. This paper presents D3, a novel and feasible RDCN architecture that improves throughput and flow completion time. D3 quickly and jointly adapts its links and packet scheduling toward the evolving demand, combining both demand-oblivious and demand-aware behaviors when needed. D3 relies on a decentralized network control plane supporting greedy, integrated-multihop, IP-based routing, allowing to react, quickly and locally, to topological changes without overheads. A rack-local synchronization and transport layer further support fast network adjustments. Moreover, we argue that D3 can be implemented using the recently proposed Sirius architecture (SIGCOMM 2020). We report on an extensive empirical evaluation using packet-level simulations. We find that D3 improves throughput by up to 15% and preserves competitive flow completion times compared to the state of the art. We further provide an analytical explanation of the superiority of D3, introducing an extension of the well-known Birkhoff-von Neumann decomposition, which may be of independent interest.