Flexible Architecture and Autonomous Control Plane for Metro-Scale Geographically Distributed Data Centers
Payman Samadi, Matteo Fiorani, Yiwen Shen, Lena Wosinska, Keren Bergman · Journal of Lightwave Technology · 2017
Enterprises and cloud providers are moving away from deployment of large-scale data centers and towards smallto mid-sized data centers because of their lower implementation and maintenance costs. An optical metro network is used to provide connectivity among these data centers. The optical network requires flexibility on bandwidth allocation and various levels of Quality of Service to support the new emerging applications and services including the ones enabled by 5G. As a result, next generation optical metro networks face complex control and management issues that needs to be resolved with automation. We present a converged inter/intra data center network architecture with an autonomous control plane for flexible bandwidth allocation. The architecture supports both single-rate and multi-rate data planes with two types of physical layer connections (Background and Dynamic) that provide connections with strict bandwidth and latency requirements. We demonstrate autonomous bandwidth steering between two data centers on our prototype. Leveraging a simulation platform, we show up to 5× lower transmission times and 25% less spectrum usage compared with the single-rate conventional non-converged networks. This is a significant improvement in the data center network performance and energy efficiency.