On the performance of a scalable optical switching architecture for flat intercluster data center network with centralized control

Abstract

Data centers have to sustain the rapid growth of data traffic due to the increasing demand of bandwidth-hungry Internet services. The current fat tree topology causes communication bottlenecks in the server interaction process, resulting in power-hungry O-E-O conversions that limit the minimum latency and the power efficiency of these systems. As a result, recent efforts have advocated that all optical data center networks (DCNs) have the capability to adapt to traffic requirements on demand. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a cascaded microelectromechanical systems switches-based DCN architecture which dynamically changes its topology and link capacities, thereby achieving unprecedented flexibility to adapt to dynamic traffic patterns. We analyze it under a data center traffic model to determine its suitability for this type of environment. The proposed architecture can be scaled to 3300 input/output ports by available experimental components with low blocking probability and latency. The blocking probability and latency are about 0.03 and 72 ms at a moderate traffic load for 32 input/output ports based on our numerical results, which are much smaller than the results for 4 input/output ports which are 0.13 and 235 ms, respectively.