Scaling architecture-on-demand based optical networks

Abstract

This paper analyzes methodologies that allow scaling properly Architecture-On-Demand (AoD) based optical networks. As Data Centers and HPC systems are growing in size and complexity, optical networks seem to be the way to scale the bandwidth of current network infrastructures. To scale the number of servers that are connected to optical switches normally Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is used to group several servers in one fiber. Using DWDM limits the number of servers per fiber to the number of wavelengths that fiber supports, and also may increase the number of packet collisions. Our proposal focuses on using Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to allow multiple servers per wavelength, allowing to scale to a larger number of servers per switch. Initial results have shown that when using TDM we can obtain similar results in performance when comparing it with DWDM. For some of the applications, TDM can outperform DWDM up to 2.4% taking into account execution time.