POTORI: a passive optical top-of-rack interconnect architecture for data centers

Several optical interconnect architectures inside data centers (DCs) have been proposed to efficiently handle the rapidly growing traffic demand. However, not many works have tackled the interconnects at top-of-rack (ToR), which have a large impact on the performance of the data center networks (DCNs) and can introduce serious scalability limitations due to their high cost and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a passive optical ToR interconnect architecture (POTORI) to replace the conventional electronic packet switch (EPS) in the access tier of DCNs. In the data plane, POTORI relies on a passive optical coupler to interconnect the servers within the rack and interfaces toward the aggregation/core tiers. The POTORI control plane is based on a centralized rack controller responsible for managing the communications among the servers in the rack. We propose a cycle-based medium access control (MAC) protocol to efficiently manage the exchange of control messages and the data transmission inside the rack. We also introduce and evaluate a dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm for POTORI, namely largest first (LF). Extensive simulation results show that, with the use of fast tunable optical transceivers, POTORI and the proposed LF strategy are able to achieve an average packet delay below 10 μs under realistic DC traffic scenarios, outperforming conventional EPSs. On the other hand, with slower tunable optical transceivers, a careful configuration of the network parameters (e.g., maximum cycle time of the MAC protocol) is necessary to obtain a good network performance in terms of the average packet delay.