A survey on key roles of optical switching and labeling technologies on big data traffic of Data Centers and HPC environments

• Main Author: Efthymios N. Lallas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: AIMS Press 2019-06-01
• Series: AIMS Electronics and Electrical Engineering
• Subjects: generalized multi protocol label switching/Path computation element (GMPLS/PCE); Software Defined Networking (SDN); Network Function Virtualisation (NFV); Elastic Optical Network (EON); Spectral Amplitude Codes (SAC)
• Online Access: https://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/ElectrEng.2019.3.233/fulltext.html

The tremendous big data and IP traffic growth rate between interconnected Data Centers (DC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) environments have imposed the need for ultrahigh link capacities and ultrahigh packet switching speeds, at network nodes. In order to overcome these ultrahigh demands, and particularly packet routing and forwarding speeds, long tested and established technologies, such as optical switching and labeling technology, seem to provide adequate solutions, not only by conveying ultrahigh bit rate data streams, but also by achieving multi Tb/s cross connection throughputs, in a cost and energy efficient way. By adoption of optical switching and labeling technology, big data streams are propagating directly in optical layer, thus lessening down bottlenecks, latency issues, and multi stage hierarchy layering. This paper, apart from optical switching and labeling potentials, investigates thoroughly other critical issues, strictly related to the proper choice of employing a switching architecture layout, such as its implementation technology, its elasticity potentials, in terms of flexible bandwidth (BW) provisioning, its adopted control plane lying on top of data infrastructure plane, providing cognition, control and orchestration over its network elements, as well as related to the proper choice of optical labeling techniques adopted, in conjunction with current, advanced, coherent, multi level modulation formats, for ultrahigh link capacities and packet switching speed demands of scalable, big data interconnected DCs and HPC environments.