E-HOSA: Extended-Hybrid Optical Switch Architecture for Cloud Computing Data Centers

Abstract

Cloud computing has recently gained significant attention because of the emergence of new internet-based applications which utilize cloud computing infrastructure in the data centers (DCs). Therefore, Internet traffic and traffic generated within a data center has also increased exponentially. Traditional data center networks, which are based on the electrical switches, are not adequate to handle increasing bandwidth demands of these applications. They are also not power efficient. A new optical switch architecture, based on optical switches, for data centers is presented in this paper. Optical switches are more power efficient and they can support larger bandwidths. The proposed architecture, namely, extended-hybrid optical switch architecture (E-HOSA), relies on software defined network (SDN) networking paradigm. Similar to SDN, E-HOSA has a separate control plane and a data plane. We perform analytical modelling of E-HOSA to evaluate its cost and power consumption. The comparative analysis of E-HOSA is performed with other famous electrical / optical networks for data centers. The results have shown significant improvement in power consumption as compared to other networks on the cost of increased capital expenditures (CAPEX). However, this increased CAPEX is mitigated to some extent due to its increased power efficiency. We also perform scalability analysis of E-HOSA. The analysis shows that E-HOSA is scalable to thousands of servers which is suitable for a very large scale data center.