Performance Evaluation Analysis of an Unslotted Transmission Mechanism in Optical Intra-Data Center Networks

The big data industry and the telecom operators gradually shift to the optical interconnection solution for their data center networks (DCN s), upgrading part of the previous electrical switching functions. During this transition time period from the electrical to the optical DCN era, the main criteria for a new switching solution assessment are the implementation simplicity, the limited cost and the restricted energy footprint. In this paper, we suggest an intra-rack DCN solution and especially a passive coupler-based optical control architecture (COCA) that uses a dedicated control wavelength for servers data transmission coordination within the same rack. We assume a simple access algorithm of asynchronous transmission over the data wavelengths, that does not require any time synchronization cost among the servers. Therefore, we ensure implementation facility and we avoid added complexity. A probabilistic model is adopted for the performance measures estimation, whilst the effect on the intra-rack network performance of the performance parameters change is explored. The results prove that the proposed COCA is more efficient for DCN traffic of small packet size. Finally, the COCA solution provides lower energy footprint and is more cost efficient than other intra-rack proposal.