Optically interconnected data center architecture for bandwidth intensive energy efficient networking

The relentless rise of data-intensive cloud-based services continues to drive network performance requirements demanded by modern data centres. Scaling electronic packet-switched data centre networks to provide bandwidths commensurate with traffic demands will either be prohibitively costly, overly complex, or result in unsustainable energy requirements. Network oversubscription, commonly used today to reduce costs, further exacerbates the performance bottleneck of communication-intensive applications. Recent network architectures based on optical circuit switching leverage the fundamentally higher capacity and energy efficiency of photonic technologies and can deliver bisection bandwidths comparable to fully provisioned packet-switched networks. However, in terms of connectivity, the high bandwidth optical paths are limited to one-to-one matching between racks within the network. We present an enhanced optically connected network architecture featuring advanced photonic functionalities to support a wider class of bandwidth-intensive traffic patterns characteristic of cloud computing systems. This proposed architecture can enable a rich set of photonic resources to be allocated on-demand to optimize communications between various applications within the data centre. We construct a prototype of the proposed optical network architecture and demonstrate two unique functionalities, validating the physical layer feasibility of the system.