NEO: A nonblocking hybrid switch architecture for large scale data centers

As the scale of data centers and cloud computing applications increases, data center networks play a critical role in meeting the huge communication bandwidth requirement of such applications. The scalability of conventional electronic data center networks is limited by wiring complexity and reaching distance of links under fixed power budget. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a nonblocking hybrid switch architecture, called NEO (Nonblocking Electronic and Optical), which is able to provide nonblocking interconnections for as many as 1,000,000 servers in a data center. NEO maintains electronic interconnections for intra-pod networks, while providing interpod interconnections by optical core switches, which not only increases the scalability of the switch architecture, but also lowers the switch cost and power consumption compared to other existing optical switch architectures. We also design a packet scheduler for NEO, which adopts a credit flow control mechanism and a parallel scheduling algorithm to avoid packet loss, and provide low communication latency. Our simulation results demonstrate that NEO achieves very low average packet delay compared to other existing optical switching architectures under various traffic patterns.