Hinting at what high-tech homes of the future might look like, researchers from Intel and University of California, Santa Barbara have started bouncing 60GHz wireless signals off the ceilings of data centers to improve bandwidth between servers, and thus improving the performance of the internet at peak times.

If you haven’t studied network engineering, here’s a quick primer in bandwidth management and quality of service: In general, the world’s internet and LAN connections are massively under-utilized. You might have a 1Gbps Ethernet connection at home, but over a 24-hour period you probably only use 0.001% of the total bandwidth. It’s the same deal in data centers: Generally, if you take the average throughput, those multi-gigabit links between racks and other data centers are more than large enough. The problem, though, is how to deal with spikes in activity. If you build a network that only has enough capacity for average use, when lunch time or after-dinner peaks roll around, the network collapses; no good.

For example, if the baseline traffic on a data center network is 1Gbps, but peaks at 10Gbps for just a few minutes at lunch time… do you wire the entire data center up with costly 10Gbps gear, or just admit that there’ll be lots of latency and packet loss at peak times? That’s the problem that Intel and Santa Barbara researchers hope to fix with short-range, rack-to-rack 60GHz wireless networks. The idea is that, at peak time, the wireless networks will switch on and provide an overflow for the wired network. The wireless network wouldn’t be quite as fast, but the researchers say that it would be a lot cheaper and easier to implement than additional wires.

The best bit is how the network will be implemented, though. As we’ve covered before, transmissions in the extremely high frequency range can be obstructed by just about anything (any object larger than 2.5mm, apparently) and so line of sight is usually required. Obviously, getting line of sight between two racks is rather hard — they’re very closely packed in data centers — and so they’ve opted for the next best thing: Bouncing signals off mirrored metal plates on the ceiling. Alternatively, the entire ceiling of the data center could be polished metal, allowing a complex mesh of wireless networks to occur above the unwitting racks. Using 3D beamforming, where the wireless aerial itself alters its angle, each server can communicate with each other.

The researchers simulated a 160-rack data center with this 60GHz wireless overflow system, and increased total throughput by 4Tbps, or 500GB/sec — which should be more than enough to get us through peak spikes… for now!

Read more at University of California, Santa Barbara [PDF]