Paper Reading

I write this article with mixed feelings, because our SIGCOMM paper, which was rushed to the New Year’s Eve, was considered “nothing new” by the reviewers because it was too similar in architecture to this lecture published on March 5 (in fact, our paper contains many technical details not mentioned in this lecture), and had to be withdrawn. How great it would be if Google published their network virtualization technology two months later!

This lecture was given by Amin Vahdat, Google’s Director of Network Technology, at the Open Networking Summit 2014 (video link), introducing the concept of Google’s network virtualization solution, codenamed Andromeda.

Introduction: This is the second article in the “Entering SIGCOMM 2013” series. For the first time, Google has fully disclosed the design and three-year deployment experience of its data center wide area network (WAN), this paper may be rated as Best Paper. Why does Google use Software Defined Networking (SDN)? How to gradually deploy SDN to existing data centers? Through the paper, we can glimpse a corner of the iceberg of Google’s global data center network.

Huge Waste of Bandwidth

As we all know, network traffic always has peaks and troughs, with peak traffic reaching 23 times the average traffic. To ensure bandwidth demand during peak periods, a large amount of bandwidth and expensive high-end routing equipment must be purchased in advance, while the average usage is only 30%40%. This greatly increases the cost of the data center.