A Power Efficient Server-to-Server Wireless Data Center Network Architecture Using 60 GHz Links

Data Centers have become the digital backbone of the modern society with the advent of cloud computing, social networking, Big data analytics etc. They play a vital role in processing the large amount of information generated. The number of Data Centers and the servers present in them has been on the rise over the last decade which has eventually led to the increase in the power consumption of the Data Center due to the power-hungry interconnect fabric which consists of switches and routers. The Significant portion of the power consumption is due to the powerhungry switching fabric necessary for communication in the datacenter. Additionally, the complex cabling in traditional datacenters pose design and maintenance challenges and increase the energy cost of the cooling infrastructure by obstructing the flow of chilled air. In this work, we address these problems of traditional datacenters by designing a unique new server-to-server wireless datacenter network (DCN) architecture. The proposed design methodology uses 60GHz unlicensed millimeter-wave bands to establish direct communication links between servers in a DCN without the need for a conventional fabric. This will reduce the power consumption of the DCN significantly and increase the in-dependency of servers from switching fabric. In our work, the previous traffic models of a data center network are studied and a new traffic model very similar to the actual traffic in data center is modeled and used for simulating the DCN environment. We first demonstrate that such a powerefficient wireless DCN can sustain the traffic requirements encountered and provide