Getting routers out of the core: Building an optical wide area network with "multipaths"

TL;DR

This paper introduces an all-optical WAN architecture using multipoint-to-multipoint lightpaths called 'multipaths' that improve efficiency and reduce complexity compared to traditional router-based networks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multipath architecture utilizing existing components, along with a flow-aware bandwidth allocation algorithm demonstrating high performance.

Findings

Lower energy consumption than OPS and OBS networks

High throughput and low delay with the proposed bandwidth algorithm

Compatible with existing optical components

Abstract

We propose an all-optical networking solution for a wide area network (WAN) based on the notion of multipoint-to-multipoint lightpaths that, for short, we call "multipaths". A multipath concentrates the traffic of a group of source nodes on a wavelength channel using an adapted MAC protocol and multicasts this traffic to a group of destination nodes that extract their own data from the confluent stream. The proposed network can be built using existing components and appears less complex and more efficient in terms of energy consumption than alternatives like OPS and OBS. The paper presents the multipath architecture and compares its energy consumption to that of a classical router-based ISP network. A flow-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm is proposed and shown to have excellent performance in terms of throughput and delay.