F4Tele: FSO for Data Center Network Management and Packet Telemetry

Abstract: The proliferation of bandwidth-hungry applications and services forces datacenter (DC) administrators to optimize the utilization of available resources. Precisely, the network share of management traffic has grown significantly because DC networks are becoming more sophisticated and require a massive amount of data for efficient debugging and troubleshooting. Accordingly, we use free space optics communication (FSO) with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology to build a flexible yet high-performance logical network responsible for management traffic. The FSO-WDM can provide reconfigurable multi-terabit topology over line-of-sight (LoS) links. Due to space and processing capacity reasons, we can not offer direct connections from every data rack to the network management racks. Alternatively, the data racks are grouped together as each group is serviced for a duration of time matches its average arrival-rate. Since the data racks showed different arrival-rates, the hotspot racks are allocated with longer service time. The evaluation results show that F4Tele carried out high throughput close to the expensive solution (benchmark).