Routing and spectrum allocation in multi-ring based data center networks

Abstract Recently, we proposed a multi-ring based optical circuit switching (OCS) network following the principle of a Clos network. The network can provide connectivity to a large number of racks which may be distributed across a relatively large geographical space in a data center. However, property of the ring based switch in the central stage of the multi-ring based OCS network introduces a unique routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) problem which is more complex than the routing problem in a classical Clos switching network. In this paper, we extend our work to investigate the RSA problem. For a given set of inter-rack traffic requests, we consider two spectrum allocation schemes, namely fixed spectrum allocation and flexible spectrum allocation. For the fixed case, we show that the RSA problem degenerates into the traditional routing problem of the Clos network. As for the flexible case, property of spectrum division multiplexing technology and bandwidth limitation of the ring based switches should be taken into consideration during allocation of the central module, such that the system throughput can be maximized. This paper presents an integer linear program (ILP) formulation as well as a heuristic algorithm we developed to solve the flexible RSA problem. We evaluate the performance of both the two spectrum allocation schemes under different traffic patterns. Our results demonstrate that, to handle uneven inter-rack traffic pattern in general data center networks, flexible spectrum allocation can lead to an increase of about 120% in system throughput, although its computational complexity is slightly higher than that of the fixed spectrum allocation scheme.