High-Capacity Clos-Network Switch for Data Center Networks

Scaling-up Data Center Networks (DCNs) should be done at the network level as well as the switching elements level. The glaring reason for this, is that switches/routers deployed in the DCN can bound the network capacity and affect its performance if improperly chosen. Many multistage switching architectures have been proposed to fit for the next-generation networking needs. However all of them are either performance limited or too complex to be implemented. Targeting scalability and performance, we propose the design of a large-capacity switch in which we affiliate a multistage design with a Networks-on-Chip (NoC) design. The proposal falls into the category of buffered multistage switches. Still, it has a different architectural aspect and scheduling process. Dissimilar to common point-to-point crossbars, NoCs used at the heart of the three-stage Clos-network allow multiple packets simultaneously in the modules where they can be adaptively transported using a pipelined scheduling scheme. Our simulations show that the switch scales well with the load and size variation. It outperforms a variety of architectures under a range of traffic arrivals.