A high-throughput energy-efficient passive optical datacenter network

Abstract

Datacenter applications impose heavy demands on bandwidth and also generate a variety of communication patterns (unicast, multicast, incast, and broadcast). Supporting such traffic demands leads to networks built with exorbitant facility costs and formidable power consumption if conventional design is followed. In this paper, we propose a novel high-throughput datacenter network that leverages passive optical technologies to efficiently support communications with mixed traffic patterns. Our network enables a dynamic traffic allocation that caters to diverse communication patterns at low power consumption. Specifically, our proposed network consists of two optical planes, each optimized for specific traffic patterns. We compare the proposed network with its optical and electronic counterparts and highlight its potential benefits in terms of facility costs and power consumption reductions. To avoid frame collisions, a high-efficiency distributed protocol is designed to dynamically distribute traffic between the two optical planes. Moreover, we formulate the scheduling process as a mixed integer programming problem and design three greedy heuristic algorithms. Finally, simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the previous POXN architecture in terms of throughput and mean packet delay.