Scafida: A Scale-Free Network Inspired Data Center Architecture

Data centers have a crucial role in current Internet architecture supporting content-centric networking. State-of-the-art data centers have different architectures like fat-tree [16, 10], DCell [12], or BCube [11]. However, their architectures share a common property: symmetry. Due to their symmetric nature, a tricky point with these architectures is that they are hard to be extended in small quantities. Contrary to state-of-the-art data center architectures, we propose an asymmetric data center topology generation method called Scafida inspired by scale-free networks; these data centers have not only small diameters and high fault tolerance, inherited by scale-free networks, but can also be scaled in smaller and less homogenous increments. We extend the original scale-free network generation algorithm of Barabasi and Albert [5] to meet the physical constraints of switches and routers. Despite the fact that our method artificially limits the node degrees in the network, our data center architectures keep the preferable properties of scale-free networks. Based on extensive simulations we present preliminary results that are promising regarding the error tolerance, scalability, and flexibility of the architecture.