Buffer Architecture Study for Effective Service of Time-Sensitive Traffic in Intra-rack Optical Data Center Networks

This paper presents a software defined (SD) passive optical intra-rack Data Center Network (DCN) architecture and studies the effect of buffer size and cycle duration variation on the DCN performance. The purpose of this study is to optimize the performance of the intra-rack DCN, especially in terms of average packet delay. After defining the buffer sizes and cycle duration based on the variation study, we present the results of several performance metrics. Specifically, simulation results show that our proposal reaches 90% bandwidth utilization, while the average packet delay remains in a few µs, with the largest increase occurring under the highest possible load.

I. Introduction

In recent years the increase in traffic in data center networks (DCNs) [1], [2] has put pressure on the organizations that manage data centers (DCs) and the need for the DCN infrastructure to be modernized. Optical technologies in recent years have been the focus of research for DCNs, due to the high transmission rate they offer, and the lower power consumption compared to electrical connection equipment.