Data Center Optical Interconnect with Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Data center is a promising infrastructure to carry the big data created by cloud computing and Internet of things. Due to the high burstiness and high-bandwidth characteristics of data center services, the data center can be interconnected by optical network to make use of the computing and storage resources and meet the high-level requirement of users, which forms two typical scenarios in terms of intra-data center and inter-data center optical network. However, in current mode of operation, the control of data center and optical network is separately deployed. Enabling even a limited interworking among this separated control systems and delay feature don't provide a mechanism to exchange resource information. In light of it, this paper proposes a novel data center optical interconnect (DCOI) architecture with software defined networking, by introducing a delay-aware service scheduling (DaSS) strategy. The DCOI can arrange and accommodate the data center applications with required QoS considering the delay factor, and enhance the responsiveness to quickly provide for data center demand. The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture are experimentally verified on our testbed with OpenFlow-based intra-data center and interdata center optical networks.