Understanding the Performance Guarantee of Physical Topology Design for Optical Circuit Switched Data Centers

Abstract

As a first step of designing O ptical-circuit-switched D ata C enters (ODC), physical topology design is critical as it determines the scalability and the performance limit of the entire ODC. However, prior works on ODC have not yet paid much attention to physical topology design, and the adopted physical topologies either scale poorly, or lack performance guarantee. We offer a mathematical foundation for the design and performance analysis of ODC physical topologies in this paper. We introduce a new performance metric β(G ) to evaluate the gap between a physical topology G and the ideal physical topology. We develop a coupling technique that bypasses a significant amount of computational complexity of calculating β(G). Using β(G ) and the coupling technique, we study four physical topologies that are representative of those in literature, analyze their scalabilities and prove their performance guarantees. Our analysis may provide new guidance for network operators to design better physical topologies for their ODCs.