Improved scalability of demand-aware datacenter topologies with minimal route lengths and congestion

The performance of more and more cloud-based applications critically depends on the performance of the interconnecting datacenter network. Emerging reconfigurable datacenter networks have the potential to provide an unprecedented throughput by dynamically reconfiguring their topology in a demand-aware manner. This paper studies the algorithmic problem of how to design low-degree and hence scalable datacenter networks that are optimized toward the current traffic they serve. Our main contribution is a novel network design which provides asymptotically minimal route lengths and congestion. In comparison to prior work, our design reduces the degree requirements by a factor of four for sparse demand matrices. We further show that the problem is already NP-hard for tree-shaped demands, but permits a 2-approximation on the route lengths and a 6-approximation for congestion. We further report on a small empirical study on Facebook traces.