Mirror mirror on the ceiling: flexible wireless links for data centers
By Xia Zhou, Zengbin Zhang, Yibo Zhu, Yubo Li, Saipriya Kumar, Amin Vahdat, Ben Y. Zhao, Haitao Zheng. CCRV, 2012
340 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d693a631720ff7e8df6e8c2636e7ad845494ffd7
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Citations in the corpus
- Big Data: A Survey (2014, background): “in [65] adopt wireless links in the 60GHz frequency band to strengthen wired links.”
- Non-Invasive Detection of Moving and Stationary Human With WiFi (2015, background): “Multiple antennas can be controlled digitally to adjust their beams towards a certain direction using beamforming techniques [37].”
- Enabling Indoor Mobile Millimeter-wave Networks Based on Smart Reflect-arrays (2018, positive): “Different from the natural reflection utilized in [16], the reflection coefficient of each patch can be electronically controlled in real time so that the direction of the reflected signal can be arbitrarily controlled.”
- FireFly (2014, methodology): “Recent work suggests a promising middleground that augments an oversubscribed network with a few reconfigurable links, using either 60 Ghz RF wireless [26, 52] or optical switches [48].”
- We Can Hear You with Wi-Fi! (2014, methodology): “We adjust the beam directions in both azimuth and elevation as in [45].”
- ProjecToR: Agile Reconfigurable Data Center Interconnect (2016, methodology): “These observations motivated us to explore a different approach in ProjecToR.”
- Millimeter Wave Communication: A Comprehensive Survey (2018, methodology): “Therefore, Zhou et al. [26] construct a 3D beamforming framework using 60GHz links in data centers based on previous efforts [167], [168].”
- Understanding and Modeling of WiFi Signal Based Human Activity Recognition (2015, background): “Flat steel objects can serve as mirrors for radio waves [34].”
- Inside the Social Network's (Datacenter) Network (2015, background): “In particular, researchers have proposed inherently non-uniform fabrics which provide qualitatively different connectivity to certain portions of the datacenter through various hybrid designs, typically including either optical [30, 39] or wireless links [25, 40].”