Optical control connectivity and access technique study for a software-defined intra-rack data center network

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a software defined network (SDN) architecture suitable for optical intra-rack data center networks (DCNs). Thus in an optical DCN, we distinguish the intra-rack communication from the inter-rack one and we focus on the intra-rack network. This is implemented by the passive optical interconnection among the rack servers using a set of dedicated data wavelengths. In this way, low power consumption is required. A SDN controller is introduced to play an administrative role in the optical intra-rack network, by determining the servers’ transmission coordination. Core of the proposed SDN configuration is the optical communication link that is assumed to connect each rack server with the SDN controller, aiming to ensure the perfect synchronization among the control and the data planes operations. Based on this assurance, we propose a synchronous transmission SDN-based pre-transmission coordination medium access control (SPC-MAC) protocol that the SDN controller follows in order to instruct the servers to transmit without packet losses due to collisions in the intra-rack network. In this way, high throughput and low delay are achieved for diverse intra-rack network configurations. Simulation results prove that the proposed software defined optical intra-rack DCN in conjunction with the proposed SPC-MAC protocol reach high bandwidth exploitation, while they provide high scalability, access fairness and reliability. ©2021 Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS)