Resource Management for Optical Interconnects in Data Centre Networks

Abstract

This paper deals with resource management in data centre networks that feature optical interconnects. It first proposes an optical resource management framework as a platform to develop different solutions for multipoint-to-multipoint optical communication systems with a centralized controller. The paper takes optical intra-rack communications as an example application scenario of the framework and studies the intra-rack scheduling (IRS) problem using a theoretical approach. The problem is mapped into the classical open-shop scheduling problem, in which the optical interfaces are viewed as the jobs and the wavelengths used for communication among the interfaces are viewed as the machines. The IRS problem can therefore be solved by adopting the existing preemptive and/or non-preemptive open-shop scheduling algorithms. In a realistic intra-rack communication scenario with non-negligible network reconfiguration time, it is important to understand whether the preemptive or non-preemptive strategy provides better performance under given traffic conditions and system configurations. To address the question, this paper presents a performance analysis that allows to quantitatively compare the two scheduling strategies in terms of packet delay and potential energy savings obtained from sleep mode implementation. Analytical results reveal that the non-preemptive strategy outperforms the preemptive one for typical configurations used in data centre networks. In addition, the tuning and wake-up times of optical transceivers are shown to be key performance-determining factors. The proposed framework and obtained findings are not limited to the considered intra-rack communication scenario, but can be applied to any centralized optical switching systems featuring multipoint-to-multipoint transmissions with non-negligible reconfiguration time.