关键词: 数据中心网络（DCN）, 光电混合架构, 阵列波导光栅路由器（AWGR）, 光波长路由, 电分组交换

Abstract: With the rapid development of cloud computing and the constant increase of the number of servers, data center network (DCN) faces great challenges, such as scalability, cost, power consumption, bandwidth and so on. This paper proposes an arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR) based hybrid opto-electrical DCN architecture. The AWGR is utilized to provide optical wavelength routing for elephant traffic and the electrical packet switch is used for mice traffic switching. The AWGR is a passive optical device and can potentially increase network reliability, reduce network power consumption and configuration delay compared with optical circuit switches. This paper also proposes three optical source plans for the network architecture: plan one only contains fixed laser diodes (FLDs) at edge switches, plan two contains hybrid fixed and tunable LDs, and plan three only contains tunable LDs (TLDs). This paper performs both numerical analysis of network cost and power consumption and theoretical analysis of network performance. Numerical results show that as the number of servers increases, the cost and power consumption of three plans all increase. Among them, the cost and power consumption of plan three increase much faster than the other two. Network performance simulation results show that the network throughput and wavelength request blocking probability of plan two are approaching to those of plan three, and they are much better than plan one. In a word, plan two has a balanced performance and cost tradeoff.

Key words: data center network (DCN), hybrid opto-electrical architecture, arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR), optical wavelength routing, electrical packet switching