Cutting the Cord: A Robust Wireless Facilities Network for Data Centers
Yibo Zhu
Xia Zhou
Zengbin Zhang
Lin Zhou
Amin Vahdat
Ben Y. Zhao
Haitao Zheng
Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM 2014)
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Paper Abstract
Today's network control and management traffic are limited by their
reliance on existing data networks. Fate sharing in this context is highly
undesirable, since control traffic has very different availability and
traffic delivery requirements. In this paper, we explore the feasibility
of building a dedicated wireless facilities network for data centers.
We propose Angora, a low-latency facilities network using low-cost,
60GHz beamforming radios that provides robust paths decoupled from the
wired network, and flexibility to adapt to workloads and network
dynamics. We describe our solutions to address challenges in link
coordination, link interference and network failures. Our testbed
measurements and simulation results show that Angora enables large number
of low-latency control paths to run concurrently, while providing low
latency end-to-end message delivery with high tolerance for radio and
rack failures.