Contentionless Architecture for Optical Interconnect (CAOI) in Data Center Network

Emerging web-based and cloud computing applications are creating the need for powerful data center networks (DCN). Optical interconnects are replacing their electrical counterparts due to their benefits. An optical interconnect that eliminates contention is proposed, hereafter called CAOI. It eliminates electronic buffering and virtual output queues which reduces the latency. Fixed data rate is guaranteed under any traffic pattern. A large class of DCN applications can be supported by this architecture. Benefits of optical wavelength division multiplexing, optical code division multiple access and optical space division multiplexing are exploited. All-to-one communication is worst communication pattern encountered in any DCN application. The performance of the proposed architecture is compared for many-to-many and all-to-one communication pattern.