A scalable AWG-based data center network for cloud computing

With the development of cloud computing and other online applications, the traffic for data center network (DCN) has increased significantly. Therefore, it is extremely important for DCNs to support more and more servers and provide high scalability, high throughput and low latency. Some current topologies for data centers have such inherent problems as poor scalability, lack of path diversity, cabling complexity, etc. This paper proposes a scalable AWG-based optical interconnection network for data centers, which is called OIT. OIT possesses good scalability and path diversity and benefits from the inherent parallelism and high capacity of WDM and AWG, which makes it a suitable candidate topology for data centers in the cloud computing era. A multi-path routing algorithm is also designed to utilize OIT׳s parallel links and distribute the load more evenly. The simulation results show that the packet latency and network throughput performance of OIT is better than that of fat tree topology under uniform random distribution or 50%, 80% intra pod traffic distribution and different packet sizes.