A recent academic paper, authored by Ji-Yong Shin, Emin Gün Sirer, and Hakim Weatherspoon of Cornell University's Department of Computer Science, in collaboration with Darko Kirovski of Microsoft Research, is entitled "On the Feasibility of Completely Wireless Datacenters".
Related: Millimeter waves enable next-generation wireless data transmission
"Conventional data centers, based on wired networks, entail high wiring costs, suffer from performance bottlenecks, and have low resilience to network failures," states the paper's introductory abstract. "In this paper, we investigate a radically new methodology for building wire-free data centers based on emerging 60 GHz RF technology."
The abstract continues, "We propose a novel rack design and a resulting network topology inspired by Cayley graphs that provide a dense interconnect. Our exploration of the resulting design space shows that wireless data centers built with this methodology can potentially attain higher aggregate bandwidth, lower latency, and substantially higher fault tolerance than a conventional wired data center, while improving ease of construction and maintenance."
View/Download the paper.
