OPMDC: Optical Pyramid Data Center Network

Abstract

Data center networks (DCNs) provide reliable and efficient infrastructures in support of a wide variety of emerging cloud and enterprise applications and services, such as grid/cloud computing, Big Data computing, and social networking. The proliferation of such data-rich delay-sensitive applications and services places a growing demand on DCNs that can deliver exceedingly high bandwidth, low latency, high reliability, and reduced power consumption at the same time. And yet, the existing state-of-the-art DCN technology that employs electrical switching of packets has been shown incapable of meeting such a demand.

In this chapter, we present a novel optical pyramid DCN architecture and its testbed, referred to as OPMDC. OPMDC performs optical per-wavelength switching using wavelength-selective-switch-based nodes in three tiers that are recursively interconnected in accordance with a pyramid structure. Such a unique architecture enables extensive wavelength reuse and therefore efficient allocation of wavelength channels. Specifically, we devise three wavelength allocation strategies to suit the needs for delivering ultra-low-latency packet-based and high-throughput circuit-based transport. Further, OPMDC is controlled and managed by means of traffic engineering algorithms that are implemented in a software-defined networking (SDN) framework. Finally, we demonstrate experimental testbed results to show that OPMDC is capable of achieving high and scalable bandwidth, low latency, high fault tolerance, and reduced power consumption and wiring complexity.