2024/04/22 by Abrar S. Alhazmi, Sanaa Hamid Mohamed, Alhazmi, Abrar S. +7
Engineering · #Advanced Optical Network Technologies #Advanced Photonic Communication Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.14143
openalex publication_date 2024/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we propose incorporating Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) and Passive Optical Network (PON) technologies into next generation spine-and-leaf Data Centre Networks (DCNs). In this work, OWC systems are used to connect the Data Centre (DC) racks through Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Infrared (IR) transceivers. The transceivers are placed on top of the racks and at distributed Access Points (APs) in the ceiling. Each transceiver on a rack is connected to a leaf switch that connects the servers within the rack. We replace the spine switches by Optical Line Terminal (OLT) and Network Interface Cards (NIC) in the APs to achieve the desired connectivity. We benchmark the power consumption of the proposed OWC-PON-based spine-and-leaf DC against traditional spine-and-leaf DC and report 46% reduction in the power consumption when considering eight racks.