With the accelerating raise of traffic demand of data center network communication, the data center switch bandwidth moves to 10 and 40 G/s or beyond. Due to the limited bandwidth of electrical switch architectures, many recent proposals turn to adopt optical technologies. However, existing data center optical architectures either have constrained port-to-port connectivity or fail to support massive ports required by enormous number of data center servers.

In this thesis paper, we design and implement BigSwitch, a novel data center switch architecture with optical devices that can achieve massive ports, arbitrary any-to-any connectivity with simple configurability. Consisting of multiple optical virtual switches, which are attached to electrical packet switches respectively, in...[ Read more ]

With the accelerating raise of traffic demand of data center network communication, the data center switch bandwidth moves to 10 and 40 G/s or beyond. Due to the limited bandwidth of electrical switch architectures, many recent proposals turn to adopt optical technologies. However, existing data center optical architectures either have constrained port-to-port connectivity or fail to support massive ports required by enormous number of data center servers.

In this thesis paper, we design and implement BigSwitch, a novel data center switch architecture with optical devices that can achieve massive ports, arbitrary any-to-any connectivity with simple configurability. Consisting of multiple optical virtual switches, which are attached to electrical packet switches respectively, in a ring, BigSwitch inherits the benefits of low cost, power and complexity from optical data center network architectures and leverages commercially available optical devices to realize our vision of connecting the data center with one big switch. Our wavelength assignment algorithms help to break through previous optical data center architecture’s any-to-any communication bottleneck and wavelength switching algorithms have been designed to reassign wavelength in terms of changes of traffic demands.

BigSwitch is designed to be a ring physically and a full-mesh logically, enabling ’publish-subscribe’ style communications and achieving the aforementioned benefits. We build a fully functional BigSwitch prototype, and demonstrate the feasibility, performance and efficiency of our design through implanting and experimenting on the prototype.