Effectively Reconfigure the Optical Circuit Switching Layer Topology in Data Center Network by OCBridge

All optical or hybrid electrical/optical switching data center network (DCN) architectures are capable of adapting the optical-layer topology to various network traffic demands based on the flexibility of optical switching technology. The topology reconfiguration strategies in previous research simply attempt to reconfigure optical circuit switching (OCS) links to offload heavier rack-to-rack traffic. However, due to the complex multi-layer interconnections and the various network traffic patterns in DCNs, the OCS links will not only offload the network traffic between its source and destination racks, but also forward the network traffic that belongs to the adjacent racks of the source and destinations racks. Previous strategies ignore the forwarding traffic and result in sub-optimal solutions. In order to overcome the shortcomings of previous methods and make full use of the OCS link resources in DCNs, an effective topology reconfiguration strategy named optical circuit bridge (OCBridge) has been proposed in our recent work. The main idea of our OCBridge is to take into account the traffic demands between the source and destination regions of each OCS link. In this paper, we first review our OCBridge, and then in simulation, we evaluate the performance of our OCBridge by testing it in two typical OCS-based DCNs, including OpenScale and Helios. Under our OCBridge, we analyze the outstanding network throughput performance of the DCNs and investigate the communication distance of traffic demands. Finally, in experiment, we deploy our OCBridge to a small prototype of OpenScale and verify that our OCBridge is capable of accelerating the distributed computing applications compared with previous topology reconfiguration strategies.