An AWGR-based bufferless interconnect for data centers

Abstract

With the rapid growth of cloud computing, there is great interest in designing improved networks for data centers. In this paper a bufferless optical interconnect called CFDOS is proposed for data center networks, which exploits the unique wavelength routing characteristics of Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router (AWGR). We take full advantage of optical parallelism and wavelength division multiplexing in our design. A feedback acknowledgement scheme is proposed in order to remove the need for loopback buffers. CFDOS also features the separated data forwarding plane and control plane. In our study, we simulate and analyze the CFDOS architecture. Simulation results for CFDOS show good performance in terms of latency and throughput.