CacheNet: Leveraging the principle of locality in reconfigurable network design

Emerging optical communication technologies support the dynamic reconfiguration of datacenter network topologies depending on the traffic they serve. However, to reap the benefits of such demand-aware networks, control logic that quickly learns and adapts to traffic patterns is required. This paper presents CacheNet, a novel approach to efficiently control demand-aware networks. CacheNet consists of two components, a demand-aware links-cache, and a demand-oblivious topology. CacheNet leverages temporal and spatial locality in the traffic by managing the reconfigurable links of the optical switches as a links-cache. Network traffic, in turn, can be served either by a link from the links-cache component or by a demand-oblivious topology component. We study several classic caching algorithms like online LFU and LRU as our caching algorithms, as well as offline optimal caching as a benchmark, and provide an analytical model which captures their performance benefits compared to an all demand-oblivious topology. Our analytical results show that based on the hit ratios and the links-cache size, when considering the average packet delay, our hybrid design outperforms a design that is based only on demand-oblivious topology. We also evaluate CacheNet empirically, using both synthetic and real-world traffic traces, confirming the potential of our approach to consider reconfigurable links as a network of links-cache.