Reliability analysis of interconnects at edge tier in datacenters

The growing popularity of cloud based applications is drastically increasing the traffic volume that datacenters have to handle. This brings the need for scalable, reliable, and energy-efficient interconnection networks inside the datacenters. Optical communication has been considered as a promising technology for datacenter applications due to its high energy- and cost-efficiency at ultra-high capacity. A typical datacenter interconnection network includes several tiers. Figure 1 shows an example with three tiers: edge, aggregation and core. Due to the large number of active devices on top of the rack (ToR) energy consumption at the edge tier is dominating the overall power consumed by all the switches within the datacenter [1–2]. Several passive optical interconnect approaches [2–4] have been proposed showing that replacing active optical devices by passive ones is possible to significantly reduce both the hardware cost and energy consumption, achieve lower maintenance complexity and offer a sufficient level of scalability.