Reducing Power Consumption of Datacenter Networks with 60GHz Wireless Server-to-Server Links
Sree Gowrishankar Umamaheswaran, Sayed Ashraf Mamun, Amlan Ganguly, Minseok Kwon, Andres Kwasinski · 2017
Datacenters have become the digital backbone of the modern society and consume enormous amounts of power. Significant portion of the power consumption is due to the power hungry switching fabric necessary for communication in the datacenter. Additionally, the complex cabling in traditional datacenters pose design and maintenance challenges and increase the energy cost of the cooling infrastructure by obstructing the flow of chilled air. In this work we address these problems of traditional datacenters by designing a server-to-server wireless datacenter network (DCN). We propose design methodologies for the use of 60GHz unlicensed millimeter-wave bands to establish direct communication links between servers in a DCN without the need for a conventional fabric. This will reduce the power consumption of the DCN significantly. We first demonstrate that such a power-efficient wireless DCN can sustain the traffic requirements encountered in small to mid-size real datacenters and provide data rates that are comparable to traditional DCNs. Having established the feasibility of a server-to-server wireless DCN in terms of performance, we estimate that its power consumption is lower by four to six times in comparison to a conventional DCN fabric.