Integrated Topology and Traffic Engineering for Reconfigurable Datacenter Networks

The state-of-the-art topologies of datacenter networks are fixed, based on electrical switching technology, and by now, we understand their throughput and cost well. For the past years, researchers have been developing novel optical switching technologies that enable the emergence of reconfigurable datacenter networks (RDCNs) that support dynamic psychical topologies. The art of network design of dynamic topologies, i.e., 'Topology Engineering,' is still in its infancy. Different designs offer distinct advantages, such as faster switch reconfiguration times or demand-aware topologies, and to date, it is yet unclear what design maximizes the throughput. This paper aims to improve our analytical understanding and formally studies the throughput of reconfigurable networks by presenting a general and unifying model for dynamic networks and their topology and traffic engineering. We use our model to study demand-oblivious and demand-aware systems and prove new upper bounds for the throughput of a system as a function of its topology and traffic schedules. Next, we offer a novel system design that combines both demand-oblivious and demand-aware schedules, and we prove its throughput supremacy under a large family of demand matrices. We evaluate our design numerically for sparse and dense traffic and show that our approach can outperform other designs by up to 25% using common network parameters.