Athena: A Fault-Tolerant, Efficient and Applicable Routing Mechanism for Data Centers

The overall performance of data center depends on the physical topology and the corresponding routing mechanism. Many novel network structures have been proposed in recent years to remedy the shortcomings of traditional tree-based structure. Especially some hybrid recursively defined structures with acceptable costs can perform well. These structures mainly adopt the conventional routing mechanism which maintains large and complex link states. However, this routing mechanism still can not work out the cost-optimal path to meet the requirement of short latency and low extra traffic consumption. Hence, this paper presents Athena Routing Mechanism (ARM) based on Dynamic Programming with path probing scheme to further promote the performance of those structures. ARM is fault-tolerant since it makes full use of redundant links. It is also able to work out the shortest paths, which shortens the communication delay and releases intermediate servers from forwarding loads as well as extra CPU and bandwidth resources. Results from theoretical analysis, simulations and experiments firmly support the conclusion that ARM is a fault-tolerant and efficient routing mechanism which is able to be generalized to many other hybrid structures.