Software-defined optical burst switching for HPC and cloud computing data centers

In this paper, we assess the performance of techniques for optical burst switching (OBS) designed for high performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing data center networks (DCNs) by using network-level simulation. We consider short-duration bursts using the faster switching technologies that are now available. The modeled switch architecture features fast optical switches in a single-hop topology with a centralized, software-defined optical control plane. Instead of using OBS with traditional methods (i.e., one-way reservation), we consider OBS with a two-way reservation protocol that results in zero burst loss. We model different workloads with various data rates by considering different edge-to-core network oversubscription ratios to investigate the performance of such designs across usage patterns. Our results reveal that the proposed technique shows considerable improvement in terms of throughput and packet loss ratio and comparable performance in terms of delay when compared to traditional methods of OBS.