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
November 2018
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).
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
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Published date: November 2018
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Local EPrints ID: 505096
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/505096
PURE UUID: e31e2941-fb72-456e-94ef-1747f90afb2d
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Date deposited: 29 Sep 2025 16:31
Last modified: 04 Oct 2025 02:19
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Author:
Abdulkadir Celik
Author:
Basem Shihada
Author:
Mohamed-Slim Alouini
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