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Mirror mirror on the ceiling: flexible wireless links for data centers

Authors:

Saipriya Kumar,

Haitao ZhengAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication

Pages 443 - 454

https://doi.org/10.1145/2342356.2342440

Published: 13 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Modern data centers are massive, and support a range of distributed applications across potentially hundreds of server racks. As their utilization and bandwidth needs continue to grow, traditional methods of augmenting bandwidth have proven complex and costly in time and resources. Recent measurements show that data center traffic is often limited by congestion loss caused by short traffic bursts. Thus an attractive alternative to adding physical bandwidth is to augment wired links with wireless links in the 60 GHz band.

We address two limitations with current 60 GHz wireless proposals. First, 60 GHz wireless links are limited by line-of-sight, and can be blocked by even small obstacles. Second, even beamforming links leak power, and potential interference will severely limit concurrent transmissions in dense data centers. We propose and evaluate a new wireless primitive for data centers, 3D beamforming, where 60 GHz signals bounce off data center ceilings, thus establishing indirect line-of-sight between any two racks in a data center. We build a small 3D beamforming testbed to demonstrate its ability to address both link blockage and link interference, thus improving link range and number of concurrent transmissions in the data center. In addition, we propose a simple link scheduler and use traffic simulations to show that these 3D links significantly expand wireless capacity compared to their 2D counterparts.

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Index Terms

Mirror mirror on the ceiling: flexible wireless links for data centers
1. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication

August 2012

474 pages

ISBN:9781450314190

DOI:10.1145/2342356

General Chairs:
Lars Eggert
NetApp, Germany
,
Jörg Ott
Aalto University, Finland
,
Program Chairs:
Venkat Padmanabhan
Microsoft Research, India
,
George Varghese
UCSD, USA

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 13 August 2012

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SIGCOMM '12

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SIGCOMM '12: ACM SIGCOMM 2012 Conference

August 13 - 17, 2012

Helsinki, Finland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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Cited By

Wilson TAmir DSaran NKleinberg RShrivastav VWeatherspoon HMohar BShinkar IO'Donnell R(2024)Breaking the VLB Barrier for Oblivious Reconfigurable NetworksProceedings of the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing10.1145/3618260.3649608(1865-1876)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618260.3649608
Mogul JWilkes J(2023)Physical Deployability MattersProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628190(9-17)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626111.3628190
Xu DZhou AYang YMa H(2023)Efficient Environment Mapping Using a Commodity Millimeter-Wave RobotIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications10.1109/TWC.2022.322966122:7(4858-4872)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TWC.2022.3229661
Teh MZhao SCao PBergman K(2023)Enabling Quasi-Static Reconfigurable Networks With Robust Topology EngineeringIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.321053431:3(1056-1070)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2022.3210534
Teh MWu ZGlick MRumley SGhobadi MBergman K(2022)Performance trade-offs in reconfigurable networks for HPCJournal of Optical Communications and Networking10.1364/JOCN.45176014:6(454)Online publication date: 11-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1364/JOCN.451760
Pacut MDai WLabbe AFoerster KSchmid S(2022)Improved Scalability of Demand-Aware Datacenter Topologies With Minimal Route Lengths and CongestionACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3529113.352912549:3(35-36)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2022
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Namyar PSupittayapornpong SZhang MYu MGovindan RKuipers FCaesar M(2021)A throughput-centric view of the performance of datacenter topologiesProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472913(349-369)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
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Zelaya RSussman WGummeson JJamieson KHu WKuipers FCaesar M(2021)LAVAProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472890(123-136)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3452296.3472890
Saha SAggarwal SAssasa HLoch APrakash NShyamsunder RSteinmetzer DKoutsonikolas DWidmer JHollick M(2021)Performance and Pitfalls of 60 GHz WLANs Based on Consumer-Grade HardwareIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.296738620:4(1543-1557)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2021
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Chen JMeng ZGuo YXu MHu H(2021)HierTopo: Towards High-Performance and Efficient Topology Optimization for Dynamic Networks2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQOS)10.1109/IWQOS52092.2021.9521261(1-10)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2021
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