Optical switching based small-world data center network

Abstract

Redesigning data center networks, particularly taking advantages of optical switching technologies to reduce cost-per-bandwidth and energy consumption, has spawned interests of researchers worldwide in recent years. In this paper, we introduce and analysis our recently proposed optical switching technology powered data center network architecture, which is inspired from the small world data center network topology yet has additional flexibility brought by optical lightpath's reconfigurability. Specifically, logically full-meshed optical burst switching rings are employed to compose a lattice substrate, which provide dense connectivity for small groups of ToR switches to accommodate highly clustered and dynamic regional data traffic, while a reconfigurable wavelength circuit switching plane offers direct connections among the racks to effectively reduce overall network diameter. A centralized control plane is employed to realize traffic-adaptive optical lightpath scheduling mechanisms. We thoroughly study the throughput and latency performance of the proposed architecture through numerical simulations, and particularly reveal the impact of traffic patterns. It turns out that, the proposed network architecture can achieve high throughput with significantly reduced cost, and exploiting its traffic-adaptive reconfiguration capability can effectively improve throughput and reduce latency under varying traffic distributions.