Survey on Traffic Management in Data Center Network: From Link Layer to Application Layer

Due to the explosive growth of all kinds of Internet services, data centers have become an irreplaceable and vital infrastructure to support this soaring trend. Compared with traditional networks, data center networks (DCNs) have unique features, such as high bandwidth, low latency, many-to-one communication mode, shallow buffered switches, and multi-root topology. These new characteristics pose a lot of challenges to previous network technics (e.g., Ethernet, Equal Cost Multi-path (ECMP), TCP), making them hard to adapt to DCNs and leading to severe performance degradation. In order to solve these challenges, DCNs have attracted a lot of attention from the industry and academia in recent years, and many new mechanisms in different layers are proposed to improve the transmission performance of data center networks. In the meantime, many surveys have emerged currently to introduce the current research of data center networks. However, previous surveys of DCNs mainly focus on only one specific network layer, making them difficult for readers to know about advanced researches on a holistic level. To help readers comprehend the current research progress of data center networks quickly, we employ a multi-layered top down taxonomy to classify the literature and propose several probable dimensions for future research in this area.