A Scalable Optical Intra-Cluster Data Center Network with an Efficient WDMA protocol: Performance and Power Consumption Study

Optical switching technology arises as the dominant technology for data center networks (DCNs), grace to its inherent capability to serve time-sensitive traffic with low power consumption. In this study, we introduce an optical DCN that groups the servers into computing clusters. An effective MAC algorithm is adopted for the communication within a cluster, based on wavelength and time division multiple access (WDMA and TDMA) techniques. The proposed MAC algorithm avoids the collisions over the channels and achieves high effectiveness, while it serves different traffic types. We investigate the proposed MAC protocol performance under diverse servers’ population per cluster to determine its scalability and performance limits. The simulation study proves that the proposed DCN architecture with the MAC protocol reaches high performance, i.e. high throughput, low delay, low dropping rate and almost 100% bandwidth exploitation, for diverse servers’ population. Finally, comparative performance and power consumption study is given.