Experimental Evaluation of Server Centric Passive Optical Network Based Data Centre Architecture

Passive optical networks (PON) technology has recently been proposed as a solution for scalability, energy efficiency, high capacity, low cost, flexibility and oversubscription issues in data centres. This paper experimentally demonstrates and discusses the implementation of a server centric PON based data centre architecture with high speed and reliability. The architecture is set up using a set of servers grouped into racks directly connected together and to the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) through gateway servers. The switching and routing functionalities have been embedded into servers using 4x10GE Xilinx NetFPGA. Flow continuity has been observed through live video streaming using IP cameras transmitting over up to 110 km optical connections through WDM nodes and the PON network.