The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

Wireless data center networks: advances, challenges, and opportunities

Wireless data center networks: advances, challenges, and opportunities
Wireless data center networks: advances, challenges, and opportunities
Data center networks (DCNs) are essential infrastructures to embrace the era of highly diversified massive amount of data generated by emerging technological applications. In order to store and process such a data deluge, today's DCNs have to deploy enormous length of wires to interconnect a plethora of servers and switches. Unfortunately, wired DCNs with uniform and inflexible link capacities expose several drawbacks such as high cabling cost and complexity, low space utilization, and lack of bandwidth efficiency. Wireless DCNs (WDCNs) have emerged as a promising solution to reduce the time, effort, and cost spent on deploying and maintaining the wires. Thanks to its reconfigurability and flexibility, WDCNs can deliver higher throughputs by efficiently utilizing the bandwidth and mitigate the chronic DCN problems of oversubscription and hotspots. Moreover, wireless links enhance the fault-tolerance and energy efficiency by eliminating the need for error-prone power-hungry switches. Accordingly, this paper first compares virtues and drawbacks of millimeter wave (mmWave), terahertz (THz), and optical wireless communications as potential candidates. Thereafter, an in-depth discussion on advances and challenges in WDCNs is provided including physical and virtual topology design, quality of service (QoS) provisioning, flow classification, data grooming, and load balancing. Finally, exciting research opportunities are presented to promote the prospects of WDCNs.
Celik, Abdulkadir
f8e72266-763c-4849-b38e-2ea2f50a69d0
Shihada, Basem
3aad5038-5b7e-4a97-9f22-7e310ea68a27
Alouini, Mohamed-Slim
3ccd5915-318e-4f4b-b47a-48257ab4c0eb
Celik, Abdulkadir
f8e72266-763c-4849-b38e-2ea2f50a69d0
Shihada, Basem
3aad5038-5b7e-4a97-9f22-7e310ea68a27
Alouini, Mohamed-Slim
3ccd5915-318e-4f4b-b47a-48257ab4c0eb

Celik, Abdulkadir, Shihada, Basem and Alouini, Mohamed-Slim (2018) Wireless data center networks: advances, challenges, and opportunities. CoRR. (doi:10.48550/arXiv.1811.11717).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Data center networks (DCNs) are essential infrastructures to embrace the era of highly diversified massive amount of data generated by emerging technological applications. In order to store and process such a data deluge, today's DCNs have to deploy enormous length of wires to interconnect a plethora of servers and switches. Unfortunately, wired DCNs with uniform and inflexible link capacities expose several drawbacks such as high cabling cost and complexity, low space utilization, and lack of bandwidth efficiency. Wireless DCNs (WDCNs) have emerged as a promising solution to reduce the time, effort, and cost spent on deploying and maintaining the wires. Thanks to its reconfigurability and flexibility, WDCNs can deliver higher throughputs by efficiently utilizing the bandwidth and mitigate the chronic DCN problems of oversubscription and hotspots. Moreover, wireless links enhance the fault-tolerance and energy efficiency by eliminating the need for error-prone power-hungry switches. Accordingly, this paper first compares virtues and drawbacks of millimeter wave (mmWave), terahertz (THz), and optical wireless communications as potential candidates. Thereafter, an in-depth discussion on advances and challenges in WDCNs is provided including physical and virtual topology design, quality of service (QoS) provisioning, flow classification, data grooming, and load balancing. Finally, exciting research opportunities are presented to promote the prospects of WDCNs.

Text
1811.11717v1 - Version of Record
Download (579kB)

More information

Published date: November 2018

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 505096
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/505096
PURE UUID: e31e2941-fb72-456e-94ef-1747f90afb2d
ORCID for Abdulkadir Celik: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-9979

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 29 Sep 2025 16:31
Last modified: 04 Oct 2025 02:19

Export record

Altmetrics

Contributors

Author: Abdulkadir Celik ORCID iD
Author: Basem Shihada
Author: Mohamed-Slim Alouini

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×