Length Shuffle: Achieving high performance and flexibility for data center networks design

Scale-out data center requires the underlying network to provide high performance and design flexibility on commodity switches. Current rigid architectures can provide high performance, but they hardly support network design flexibility. Flexible proposals address the issue of elasticity in the rigid networks. However, the introduction of random connection cannot provide guaranteed network performance. In this paper, we proposed Length Shuffle connection to address the performance issue in flexible data center networks. The proposed approach follows a greedy principle that gradually connects the furthest two switches with their available ports. Length Shuffle connection can reduce the number of long paths significantly, which results in a small average length of routing path. The proposed connection can work with random connection and regular connection in flexible network construction, and does not interfere the original routing protocols. Numerical analysis shows the nice properties of Length Shuffle connection in various dimensions. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the advantages of Length Shuffle connection in data transmission delay and aggregate throughput under different traffic patterns.