A Reconfigurable High-Performance Optical Data Center Architecture

Optical data center network architectures are becoming attractive because of their low energy consumption, large bandwidth, and low cabling complexity. In [1], an AWGR-based passive optical data center architecture (PODCA) is presented. Compared with other optical data center architectures, e.g., DOS [2], Proteus [3], and Petabit [4], PODCA can save up to 90% on power consumption and 88% in cost. Also, average latency can be low as 9 s at close to 100% throughput. However, PODCA is not reconfigurable and cannot optimize the network topology to dynamic traffic. In this paper, we present a novel, scalable and flexible reconfigurable architecture called RODCA. RODCA is built on and augments PODCA with a flexible localized intra-cluster optical network. With the reconfigurable intra-cluster network, racks with mutually large traffic can be located within the same cluster, and share the large bandwidth of the intra-cluster network. We present an algorithm for DCN topology reconfiguration, and present simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of reconfiguration.