Experimental Evaluation of Passive Optical Network Based Data Centre Architecture

Abstract: Passive optical networks (PON) technology is increasingly becoming an attractive solution in modern data centres as it provides energy efficient, high capacity, low cost, scalable and flexible connectivity. In this paper we report the implementation of a PON based data centre architecture that provides high resilience and high speed interconnections by providing alternative communication routes between servers in different racks. Each rack is divided into several groups of servers and connects to other racks and the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) through a set of server that acts as relay servers. We implement the switching and routing functionalities within servers using 4x10GE Xilinx NetFPGA, and demonstrate end-to-end communication using IP cameras live video streaming over up to 100 km optical connections through WDM nodes and the PON network.