Optical Intra- and Inter-Rack Switching Architecture for Scalable, Low-Latency Data Center Networks

Abstract

In this paper we propose a DC network (DCN) architecture that interconnects servers in the intra-rack and inter-rack domain, utilizing optical switching at each domain. The proposed interconnection techniques are studied as an intermediate step before migrating the entire DCN to all-optical schemes. Unlike other studies, we study the server-to-server communication across the whole DCN. For the performance evaluation we produce numerical results for throughput and end-to-end delay for three traffic classes co-existing in DCN s. The numerical analysis reveals that bandwidth utilization reaches 90% and 100% in the intra- and inter- domain respectively. Meanwhile, the maximum end-to-end delay for the highest priority packets under congested load is lower than 0.56 and 0.41 µs for the two examined intra-rack capacity scenarios of 400 and 600 Gbps respectively. A comparative study shows that our solution can effectively interconnect up to 10000 servers with lower environmental footprint and end-to-end delay than other DCN s.