Abstract

In this era of ubiquitous computing, coupled with the emergence of big data and internet of things, there have been constant changes in every aspect of cloud data center communications - its network connectivity, data storage, data transfer, and architectural design. As a result of this, the amount of data transferable, and the frequency of data transfer have tremendously increased; causing device failures and traffic congestions. To cope with these changes so that performance can be sustained amidst device failures and traffic congestion, the design of fault tolerant cloud data center is important. A fault tolerant cloud data center network should be able to provide alternative paths from source to destination during failures so that there will not be abrupt fall in performance. But still with the ongoing researches in this regard, there has not been a robust cloud data center design that can boast of being suitable for alleviating the poor fault tolerance of cloud data center. In this paper, we proposed the improved versions of fat-tree interconnection hybrid designs derived from the structure called Z-fat tree; to address the issues of fault tolerance. Then, we compared these designs with single fat tree architecture with the same amount of resources for client server communication pattern such as Email application in a cloud data center. The simulation results obtained based on failed switches and links, show that our proposed hybrid designs outperformed the single fat tree design as the inter arrival time of the packets reduces.