Fault-tolerance characteristics of data center network topologies using fault regions

Data center networks (DCNs) are inherently failure-prone owing to the existence of many links, switches and servers. Many times the failures of the components may be correlated resulting a set of connected components failing together. This correlated failure behaviour could be captured through the use of fault regions [1]. This paper explores the effect of such failures in DCNs, using four topologies, viz., Fat Tree, DCell, FlatNet and BCube. We used two categories of metrics for evaluation: connection-oriented metrics, including aggregated bottleneck throughput (ABT), average path length (APL) and routing failure rate (RFR); and network size-oriented metrics, including Component Decomposition Number (CDN) and Smallest/Largest Component Size (SCS/LCS).