On the feasibility of completely wireless datacenters

Abstract

We introduce a novel data center design based on emerging 60 GHz RF technology that uses wires only to deliver power to its server nodes. Fundamental limitation of wireless data centers is that the maximum number of live connections in the network is directly proportional to the full volume occupied by the data center divided by the radiating volume of a single antenna beam. Consequently, we integrate wireless transceivers and switching logic within each server node and collocate them in cylindric racks to establish a semi-regular mesh topology. Our exploration of the resulting design space shows that while attaining comparable bandwidth, our wireless data center exhibits substantially higher fault tolerance, improved latency, lower power consumption, and easier maintenance than a conventional wired data center.

Free space optical data center architecture design with fully connected racks

“…Therefore, we only aim to have an approximate sense of the FSO-DC cost. We consider the price of the TOR, aggregate and core switches following [1], however, we also include the cost of the network interface cards (NICs). Tables II and III depict the prices used in our calculations and the costs of three reference CDC configurations used to connect 10K servers for comparison, respectively [1].…”

“…However, cabling technologies (i.e., copper-cables and fiber optics) currently deployed in conventional wired data centers (CDCs), require larger number of cables to support higher data rates. Besides limiting the possible topologies and connectivity, this results into design and development problems for the infrastructure of wire ducting and maintenance, heat dissipation, and power consumption [1].…”

“…As a solution for the capacity problem of the CDCs, the possibility of integrating 60 GHz radio frequency (RF) technology into CDCs is being investigated [1]- [3]. 60 GHz links are capable of adding multi-Gbps rates [3].…”

“…60 GHz links are capable of adding multi-Gbps rates [3]. On the other hand, to address the cabling problems, a completely wireless DC design using the 60 GHz technology is proposed in [1].…”

“…Radiation patterns of 60 GHz impose additional restrictions on the activity of wireless modules in close proximity to avoid interference. This increases the complexity of routing and network management, and reduces the throughput [1].…”