Evaluating the Efficiency of Optical Circuit Switching in Mega Data Centers

Abstract

The issues of scalability and energy efficiency in mega data centers are growing because the east-west traffic is growing at a very high rate and the traditional electrical packet-switched (EPS) networks are constrained. Optical circuit switching (OCS) has come to be a promising complement to the packet switching because it offers high capacity data transport with improved energy-efficiency to support large and steady data traffic. The paper is a systematically assessed comparison of EPS-only data center architectures, OCS-assisted, and hybrid EPS-OCS data center architectures based on a coherent experimental system. The evaluation of performance is done in terms of throughput, flow completion time, energy per delivered bit, optical circuit utilization, and blocking behavior to real traffic workload. The findings indicate that hybrid EPSOCS architectures achieve much better aggregate throughput and lower energy use without compromising low latency with respect to short and latency-sensitive flows. The optical circuits are utilized highly with little blocking, but the inefficiency is still evident when there is a dynamic traffic. In sum, it can be concluded that optical circuit switching is the most effective when embedded in traffic-conscious hybrid constructions that can provide a viable and scalable approach to next-generation mega data centers networks