Accelerating cast traffic delivery in data centers leveraging physical layer optics and SDN

The rising popularity of cloud computing and big data applications has led to massive volumes of rack-to-rack traffic featuring diverse communication patterns denoted as *-cast that combines unicast, multicast, incast and all-to-all cast. Effective support of these traffic patterns in data center networks is still an open problem. We propose a hybrid (optical and electrical) approach that leverages physical layer optics to accelerate traffic delivery for each pattern. Our design consists of an application-driven control plane compatible with software defined networking (SDN) to dynamically configure the optics. We present the network architecture and control plane design and results on the multicast case.