POPI: A Passive Optical Pod Interconnect for High Performance Data Centers

We propose an original approach for realizing an all-optical data center interconnect. This consists in interconnecting racks of servers by WDM channels via an optical coupler and applying an EPON-like dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm. We apply this approach to design a switch-free, pod-sized data center interconnect that we call POPI for Passive Optical Pod Interconnect. Bandwidth sharing is realized by a central controller that implements an original MAC protocol and DBA algorithm. We evaluate latency and throughput performance, accounting for the dynamic, stochastic nature of data center traffic.