CDRDN: Content Driven Routing in Datacenter Network

A major challenge in data center networks is to provide enough network capacity to meet the ever increasing demand of large-scale distributed computing. While existing proposals focus on adding more switches and links, which cost extra hardware and energy, we explore another dimension in which spare disk space at servers is used for caching data, so as to increase network throughput without additional hardware. Leveraging the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture and unique characteristics of data centers, we design a novel Content Driven Routing in Datacenter Network (CDRDN) that enables universal caching in data center networks in an efficient and scalable way. First, rather than using switches for “on-path” caching like in native NDN, CDRDN uses the large storage space at servers to do “off-path” caching. Second, by taking advantage of data center's regular and hierarchical network topology, CDRDN switches are able to direct requests to nearby server caches even under high dynamics of caches. Third, given the vast amount of data in data centers, the full name-based routing table would be difficult to fit in switch's limited fast memory. CDRDN adopts a compound content and location routing to ensure packet delivery while benefiting from name-based routing as much as the switches can afford. CDRDN extends NDN's adaptive forwarding mechanism to deal with cache misses, link failures, and congestion without running routing protocols or cache exchange protocols. Our packet-level simulations show that CDRDN can almost double the network throughput compared with shortest-path routing under the same setting, and CDRDN can effectively deal with link failures using adaptive forwarding.