High performance AWGR PONs in data centre networks

Abstract

The unprecedented advances in Passive Optical Networks (PONs) and their proven performance in access networks have encouraged researcher to investigate the use of passive optics to address the limitations of conventional data centre architectures. In this paper, we present a scalable, high capacity and energy efficient arrayed wave guide grating router (AWGR) PON based data centre architecture to facilitate inter and intra racks communication within data centres. The proposed architecture can be scaled up efficiently to hundreds of thousands of servers and has shown energy savings of 45% and 80% compared to the Fat-Tree and BCube architectures, respectively.