Efficient bandwidth allocation in the NEPHELE optical/electrical datacenter interconnect

The NEPHELE data center interconnection network relies on hybrid electro-optical top-of-rack switches to interconnect servers over multi-wavelength optical rings. The bandwidth of the rings is shared, and an efficient utilization of the infrastructure calls for coordination in the time, space, and wavelength domains. To this end, we present offline and incremental dynamic resource assignment algorithms. The algorithms are suitable for implementation in a software defined network control plane, achieving efficient, collision-free, and on demand capacity use. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms can achieve high utilization and low latency in a variety of traffic scenarios that include hot spots and/or rapidly changing traffic.