GARDEN: Generic Addressing and Routing for Data Center Networks

Data centers often hold tens to hundreds of thousands of servers in order to offer cloud computing services at scale. Ethernet switching and IP routing have their own advantages and limitations in building data center networks. Recent research, such as PortLand and BCube, has proposed scalable data center network designs. A common feature of these designs is that their addressing and routing are customized to specific topologies. In this paper, we propose a generic addressing, routing and forwarding protocol for data center networks, which works on arbitrarily "layered\´\´ network topologies. We first form the network as a multi-rooted tree. Each network node (i.e., hosts and switches) is then assigned one or more locators, and each locator encodes a downward path from the roots to this node. Data center networks often have rich path diversity, so tracking all locators of a destination node will cause switches to have very large forwarding tables. We further use a new forwarding model to reduce the forwarding states. In addition, the multiple-locator mechanism brings built-in support for multi-path routing, load balancing and fault tolerance. Evaluations based on simulations and prototype experiments demonstrate that our proposal achieves our design goals.