Your Data Center Switch is Trying Too Hard
Xin Jin, Nathan Farrington, Jennifer Rexford · 2016
We present Sourcey, a new data center network architecture with extremely simple switches. Sourcey switches have no CPUs, no software, no forwarding tables, no state, and require no switch configuration. Sourcey pushes all control plane functions to servers. A Sourcey switch supports only source-based routing. Each packet contains a path through the network. At each hop, a Sourcey switch pops the top label on the path stack and uses the label value as the switch output port number. The major technical challenge for Sourcey is to discover and monitor the network with server-only mechanisms. We design novel algorithms that use only end-to-end measurements to efficiently discover network topology and detect failures.