Optimized Passive Optical Networks with Cascaded-AWGRs for Data Centers

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cascaded AWGR-based PON architecture for data centers that enhances energy efficiency, scalability, and resilience, achieving significant power savings over traditional architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 2-tier cascaded AWGR design managed by SDN, improving routing, load balancing, and energy efficiency in data center networks.

Findings

Up to 43% reduction in power consumption compared to Fat-Tree architectures.

Enhanced load balancing and resilience through multiple paths.

Scalable design suitable for modern data center demands.

Abstract

The use of Passive Optical Networks (PONs) in modern and future data centers can provide energy efficiency, high capacity, low cost, scalability, and elasticity. This paper introduces a passive optical network design with 2-tier cascaded Arrayed Waveguide Grating Routers (AWGRs) to connect groups of racks (i.e. cells) within a data center. This design employs a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller to manage the routing and assignment of the networking resource while introducing multiple paths between any two cells to improve routing, load balancing and resilience. We provide benchmarking results for the power consumption to compare the energy efficiency of this design to state-of-the-art data centers. The results indicate that the cascaded AWGRs architecture can achieve up to 43% saving in the networking power consumption compared to Fat-Tree data center architecture.