TIO: A VLC-Enabled Hybrid Data Center Network Architecture

To satisfy the ever-increasing bandwidth demand of modern data centers, researchers have proposed hybrid Data Center Networks (DCNs), which employ high-bandwidth Optical Circuit Switches (OCSs) to compensate for Electrical Packet Switches (EPS). Existing designs, such as Helios and c-Through, mainly focus on reconfiguring optical devices to meet the estimated traffic requirements. However, these designs face two major challenges in their OCS-based networks, namely, the complex control mechanism and cabling problems. To solve these challenges, we propose TIO, a hybrid DCN that employs Visible Light Communication (VLC) instead of wired OCS design to connect racks. TIO integrates the wireless VLC-based Jellyfish and wired EPS-based Fat Tree seamlessly and combines the opposite and complementary characteristics, including wireless VLC direct connection and wired electrical packet switching, random graph, and Clos topology properties. To further exploit the merits of TIO, we design a hybrid routing scheme and congestion-aware flow scheduling method. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that TIO outperforms the Jellyfish and Fat Tree in both topology properties and network performance, and the flow scheduling method also evidently improves performance.