Traffic Burstiness Study of an Efficient Bandwidth Allocation MAC Scheme for WDM Datacenter Networks

This paper presents a centralized medium access control (MAC) protocol for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical intra-rack data center networks (DCNs) which exploit the software-defined (SD) networking scheme. Especially, in this paper we introduce an efficient bandwidth allocation strategy called EBA-MAC to coordinate communication between servers within a single rack. The primary objective of EBA-MAC is to prevent data collisions and minimize latency for users of cloud applications. The proposed SD optical intra-rack DCN architecture accompanied by the suggested EBA-MAC protocol achieves a 95.5% optical bandwidth utilization and an average packet delay of few µs, meeting the strict delay requirements of modern cloud services. Compared to a SotA intra-rack DCN approach, it achieves an 8% higher throughput and 95% less mean packet delay for heavy loads. The stability of the proposed EBA-MAC protocol is also investigated under varying bursty traffic scenarios to explore its performance level for delay-sensitive applications.