FAR: A fault-avoidance routing method for data center networks with regular topology

With the widely deployed cloud services, data center networks are evolving toward large-scale and multi-path networks, which cannot be supported by conventional routing methods, such as OSPF and RIP. To alleviate this issue, some new routing methods, such as PortLand and BSR, are proposed for data center networks. However, these routing methods are typically designed for a specific network architecture, and thus lacking adaptability while complex in fault-tolerance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a generic routing method, named fault-avoidance routing (FAR), for data center networks that have regular topologies. FAR simplifies route learning by leveraging the regularity in a topology. FAR also greatly reduces the size of routing tables by introducing a novel negative routing table (NRT) at routers. The operations of FAR is illustrated by an example Fat-tree network and the performance of FAR is analyzed in detail. The advantages of FAR are verified through extensive OPNET simulations.