Yiting (Tina) Xia, lambda^{group}: The Case for Optical Multicast in the Data Center

The talk presents a novel network architecture to accelerate group data delivery in data centers as motivated by the increasing number of applications featuring heavy one-to-many communications. IP multicast is rarely used in data center group transmissions due to its intrinsic limitations in the data center environment. Specifically, reliable IP multicast is inefficient in over-subscribed data centers, where the network core is congested and performance becomes unpredictable. Furthermore, the large number of group states that need to be maintained leads to issues with scalability and management complexity. The proposed architecture overcomes this difficulty by leveraging photonic technologies, which not only achieve significant bandwidth increase and power savings over their electronic counterparts but also reduce the complexity of group data As a result, the architecture provides high-speed, energy-efficient, point-to-multipoint data delivery featuring predictable performance and easy implementability. I will discuss fundamental requirements of the architecture and describe our design methodology. Large-scale simulations under a variety of network conditions show significant performance improvement relative to various prevalent group delivery approaches. The implementation of a modest-scale functional prototype is used to evaluate physical layer considerations in the context of real-world traffic and further demonstrates the feasibility of the architecture.