Design and Evaluation of a Software Defined Passive Optical Intra-Rack Network in Data Centers

This paper presents the design of a software defined passive optical intra-rack network (SD-POIRN) based on optical coupler fabric in data centers. The data plane of SD-POIRN is a broadcast-and-select optical network combining wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and time division multiplexing (TDM) technologies. The control plane of SD-POIRN has a centralized rack controller for scheduling intra-rack data transmissions. This paper proposes a software defined media access control protocol (SD-MAC) for SD-POIRN. The SD-MAC utilizes dynamic server transmission and receiving grouping methods and max-min fair share bandwidth allocation algorithms to dynamically allocate wavelengths and time slots among servers in an efficient and fair manner. Network performance evaluation results show that the proposed SD-MAC protocol effectively increases network throughput.