Abstract
The rapid increasing traffic in data centers (DCs) puts tremendous pressure to the present multi-tier network architectures and electrical switching techniques. Switching traffic in the optical domain featuring ultra-high bandwidth, therefore, has been intensively investigated to build the high capacity data center networks (DCNs). To handle the variable traffic pattern in DCs, the network reconfigurability with adaptable optical bandwidth allocation is of key importance to flexibly assign the optical bandwidth. To this end, we propose and experimentally evaluate a software-defined networking enabled reconfigurable optical DCN with dynamic bandwidth allocation in this work, based on novel optical top of racks exploiting a wavelength selective switch. Experimental assessments show that the proposed solution can automatically reallocate the optical bandwidth in real-time to adapt the dynamic traffic pattern. Compared with the conventional optical DCN with static bandwidth provision, the end-to-end latency performance of the reconfigurable scheme with adaptable bandwidth allocation improves of 58.3% and the average packet loss decreases one order of magnitude. Moreover, the reconfigurable optical DCN features deterministic latency performance, with much lower time variations of packets delivery completion. Based on the experimental parameters, the simulation platform is also built to validate the good scalability of the proposed reconfigurable DCN. Numerical results illustrate the negligible performance degradation (11%) as the network scales from 2560 to 40 960 servers.
Highlights
With the escalation of traffic-boosting services and applications, such as Internet of Things, cloud computing and high definition streaming, traffic bandwidth growth in data centers (DCs) exceeds that of wide-area telecom networks and even outpaces the bandwidth growth rate of electrical switch application-specific integrated circuits [1]
At a load of 0.3, the packet loss is less than 1 × 10−5 and the server-to-server latency is below 3.5 μs for the large scale (40 960 servers) network, which indicates the good scalability of the proposed reconfigurable optical data center networks (DCNs)
We propose and experimentally evaluated an software-defined network (SDN) enabled optical DCN with reconfigurable optical bandwidth provisioning, based on photonic integrated fast semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs)-based switches and novel optical top of racks (ToRs) deploying wavelength-selective switches (WSSs)
Summary
With the escalation of traffic-boosting services and applications, such as Internet of Things, cloud computing and high definition streaming, traffic bandwidth growth in data centers (DCs) exceeds that of wide-area telecom networks and even outpaces the bandwidth growth rate of electrical switch application-specific integrated circuits [1]. Leveraging various optical switch techniques, a multitude scenarios of optical data center networks (DCNs) have been proposed and numerically investigated, such as microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMSs) based WaveCube [7], semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) built HiFOST and OPSquare [8, 9] and LIONS based on arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) routers [10], or a combination thereof architecture deploys wavelength-selective switches (WSSs), presented in [11] In all these aforementioned optically switched schemes, once the network is built, the optical bandwidth between any top of racks (ToRs) is fixed because the bandwidth is determined by the amounts of the pre-deployed transceivers (TRXs).
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