The communication infrastructure is a critical component of a large-scale cloud data center. It needs to provide the best performance available while keeping overprovisioning and, lately even more important, power consumption, to the minimum. Aiming to provide a unified solution that will have high performance together with economical benefits and power consumption reduction, in this paper, we propose a new community-based scale-free model for data center network architecture. By comparing the proposed model to other similar solutions we show that the performance of the network in terms of average path length, bandwidth and resilience is similar to the state-of-the-art models. In our presented detailed analysis of the model properties, our focus is set on exploring how heterogeneity in terms of different type of network equipment influences the basic network properties. We also present solutions and network metrics that can be used in conjunction to the introduced community structure in order to additionally increase the performance.
