NEPHELE: An End-to-End Scalable and Dynamically Reconfigurable Optical Architecture for Application-Aware SDN Cloud Data Centers

Paraskevas Bakopoulos, Konstantinos Christodoulopoulos, Giada Landi, Muzzamil Aziz, Eitan Zahavi, Domenico Gallico, Richard Pitwon, Konstantinos Tokas, Ioannis Patronas, Marco Capitani, Christos Spatharakis, Konstantinos Yiannopoulos, Kai Wang, Konstantinos Kontodimas, Ioannis Lazarou, Philipp Wieder, Dionysios I. Reisis, Emmanouel Manos Varvarigos, Matteo Biancani, Hercules Avramopoulos

Abstract: The efficient integration of optical switching in data center networks is being studied as a means to cope with surging traffic demands. Optically switched, flatter network architectures more efficiently handle the east-west traffic profiles of modern data centers. Limitations in the port count and reconfiguration speed of optical switches require novel network designs offering network scalability and dynamicity. Interaction of the optically switched data plane with a software-defined control and orchestration framework, meeting current common practices in data centers, necessitates the design of custom network control algorithms and software modules as well as the integration of novel functionalities. The approach of the European project NEPHELE is presented, offering an endto- end solution that addresses the optical data plane, the control plane, and its interaction with the application layer.