Accelerating cast traffic delivery in data centers leveraging physical layer optics and SDN

Abstract

The rising popularity of cloud computing and big data applications has led to massive volumes of rack-to-rack traffic featuring diverse communication patterns denoted as *-cast that combines unicast, multicast, incast and all-to-all cast. Effective support of these traffic patterns in data center networks is still an open problem. We propose a hybrid (optical and electrical) approach that leverages physical layer optics to accelerate traffic delivery for each pattern. Our design consists of an application-driven control plane compatible with software defined networking (SDN) to dynamically configure the optics. We present the network architecture and control plane design and results on the multicast case.