A team from Cornell University and Microsoft concludes that a wireless data center could replace one with “traditional” links.

A team of researchers from Microsoft and Cornell University has concluded that, in some cases, a totally wireless data center makes logistical sense.

In a new paper, a team of researchers from Cornell and Microsoft concluded that a data-center operator could replace hundreds of feet of cable with 60-GHz wireless connections—assuming that the servers themselves are redesigned in cylindrical racks, shaped like prisms, with blade servers addressing both intra- and inter-rack connections.

The so-called “Cayley” data centers, so named because of the network connectivity subgraphs are modeled using Cayley graphs, could be cheaper than traditional wired data centers if the cost of a 60-GHz transceiver drops under $90 apiece, and would likely consume about one-tenth to one-twelfth the power of a wired data center.

There’s just one problem, however: Cayley datacenters are expected to show significantly better latency on average than conventional data centers and so-called “fat tree” networks, except under peak load.

“Conventional datacenters, based on wired networks, entail high wiring costs, suffer from performance bottlenecks, and have low resilience to network failures,” the paper’s authors, Ji-Yong Shin, Emin Gün Sirer, and Hakim Weatherspoon of Cornell, wrote. The co-author was Darko Kirovski, of Microsoft Research.