DCNSim: A data center network simulator

Large-scale data centers form the infrastructure backbone for supporting cloud computing. The network interconnecting the servers in the data center plays a crucial role in the performance and dependability characteristics of the data centres. With the plethora of data center network (DCN) topologies that have been proposed in the literature, there is a sore need for a standardized method for evaluating and comparing various alternate DCN architectures. Considering these needs, we designed DCNSim, a general purpose DCN simulator that supports most well-known DCN topologies proposed in the literature. Our simulator can generate various metrics for the topologies, including static metrics like average path length, aggregated bottleneck throughput, routing failure rate; and dynamic metrics like packet loss rate, average buffer size and link utilization. The modular and flexible architecture of the simulator permits easy extension to support any future proposed topologies and compute new metrics. © 2013 IEEE