A Wavelength Borrowing Architecture for Optical Data Center Networks - Extended Version

Abstract

The growth of east-west traffic, along with the cost and power consumption of electronic switching, is motivating the integration of a low-power, high-rate, all-optical layer within the data center network. This paper presents a spine-leaf all-optical architecture in which the default wavelength configuration, one wavelength per source--destination leaf pair, can be reconfigured to accommodate unbalanced traffic demand: wavelengths that are unused or lightly loaded at one leaf are borrowed by another leaf with higher demand. This topology-engineering capability is combined with a traffic-engineering scheme, based on two-hop detouring, enabling the control of wavelength load while limiting the amount of detoured traffic. A key feature of the architecture is that its degree of wavelength reconfigurability is set by a single tunable parameter, the borrowing degree $B$, ranging from none to full; performance evaluation shows that near-optimal performance is achieved well below the maximum $B$, saving the complexity and cost of fully reconfigurable solutions. Furthermore, the optical fabric relies on mature, data-center-grade components, namely AWGs, AWGRs, colorless OXCs, and combiners, whose reconfiguration speed makes the architecture deployable at network tiers where traffic demand persists over seconds or longer, e.g., among groups of racks (pods). The architecture is also TDMA-transparent, a property that future work could exploit to refine the borrowing unit below a whole wavelength without changing the optical fabric.