Effective *-flow schedule for optical circuit switching based data center networks: A comprehensive survey

Abstract

To overcome the performance bottlenecks (e.g. power consumption and bandwidth) of electrical packet switching based data center networks, Optical Circuit Switching(OCS) technology has been widely studied recently, aiming at constructing the next-generation data center and carrying the ever-increasing network traffic. To achieve this goal, how to effectively handle the emerging application-level communication in nowadays data centers, i.e. how to adapt OCS to various of traffic flows, has turned to one of the crucial topics in this area. In this paper, we summarize the state-of-the-art works that focus on the flow schedule problems in OCS based data center networks and further introduce the future directions. The scope of this paper includes the schedule problems on unicast-flows, multicast-flows, and co-flows, which are denoted as *-flows in this paper, and are the major traffic patterns in the modern data center networks. The purpose of this paper is to present a broad research guideline for the *-flow scheduling of OCS, and motivate researchers to develop more innovative proposals and algorithms.