Abstract:Under the new application mode, the traditional hierarchy data centers face several limitations in size, bandwidth, scalability, and cost. In order to meet the needs of new applications, data center network should fulfill the requirements with low-cost, such as high scalability, low configuration overhead, robustness and energy-saving. First, the shortcomings of the traditional data center network architecture are summarized, and new requirements are pointed out. Secondly, the existing proposals are divided into two categories, i.e. server-centric and network-centric. Then, several representative architectures of these two categories are overviewed and compared in detail. Finally, the future directions of data center network are discussed.