Prof. Heather Zheng and Ben Zhao’s Work Reported by New York Times

A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams

A new feature article in the New York Times (January 15, Sunday edition) describes some of the innovative work done at UCSB by our own Professors Heather Zheng and Ben Zhao. The project, led by Professor Zheng in collaboration with Zhao and Professor Amin Vahdat (UC San Diego and Google), is developing a new way of using high frequency, focused wireless “beams” to deliver flexible communication links in today’s high-performance data centers. While traditional network cables provide high capacity between racks of servers, they are costly to deploy and difficult or impossible to modify after deployment. This poses significant problems for data centers, where measurements have shown that they often experience short-term traffic bursts that cause congestion in parts of the network. These new wireless beams in the 60 GHz frequency effectively provide on-demand, point-to-point high speed connections between racks of servers.

Whereas initial work called for straight rack-to-rack connections, these problem is that links are easily blocked by other racks and radios, making signals take multiple hops between racks, increasing delay and reducing throughput. Professor Zheng’s new take on this problem is to “bounce” these signals off of reflective metal plates on the ceiling, allowing any two racks to talk to each other in a single hop. After publishing an earlier study, her group is already building a prototype of this novel platform in their lab, and hope to have more results published later this year.

The New York Times article is available here.