Photonic Network Communications

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11107-019-00869-5

ORIGINAL PAPER

RSS: a relay‑based schedule scheme for optical data center network

Shangqi Ma1 · Huaxi Gu1 · Hao Lan1 · Xiaoshan Yu1 · Kun Wang2

Received: 2 January 2019 / Accepted: 24 October 2019

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
The ever-increasing communication requirements have led to the introduction of optical circuit switch (OCS) to data center,
which is capable of providing more flexible bandwidth allocation compared to the electrical packet switching. However,
the challenge still arises due to non-negligible reconfiguration delay of commercially available MEMS-based optical cir-
cuit switching technology, even though it provides high bandwidth with low per-bit cost and power. Additionally, existing
scheduling schemes amortize long switch delay by means of reconfiguring OCS every a few 100 s of milliseconds, not only
causing the degradation of the latency performance, but also incurring the low utilization of optical links. In this paper, we
propose an OCS-based scheduling scheme called relay-based schedule scheme (RSS), which can leverage idle optical paths
to forward traffic from remote nodes only with straightforward software modifications on controller. We evaluate the perfor-
mance of the proposed scheme via OMNET++ simulator, and the results demonstrate that our proposal delivers significant
benefits, including reducing the average mice flow FCTs (flow complete time) by up to 80% and reducing the end-to-end
packet delay by 50% compared to non-RSS schemes.

Keywords  Data center networks · Scheduling scheme · Optical circuit switching

1 Introduction The emerging optical interconnect technology has attracted

more and more attention from academia and industry by
Electrical packet switching (EPS) has been the corner- virtue of capacities of supporting high link bandwidths at
stone of datacenter network (DCN) for many years. How- low per-bit cost and power.
ever, as the transmission speed increases sharply in future The past few years have seen the emergence of optical
DCN, the great power dissipation brought by the electrical circuit switching (OCS) technology, which is a promising
switch will limit the boost of link bandwidth. Moreover, candidate to the traditional EPS [1]. Researchers have pro-
the cabling complexity and the cost of non-oversubscribed posed network architectures based on OCS [2–8]. Micro-
network remain significant challenges to EPS-based DCN. electromechanical system (MEMS) switches have been
widely adopted in OCS-based networks due to their mature
technology and relatively low prices [5, 9]. Compared to
* Huaxi Gu traditional EPS-based DCN, OCS-based DCN features scal-
hxgu@xidian.edu.cn
able bandwidth, efficient energy and high flexibility. Addi-
Shangqi Ma tionally, with the help of wavelength-division multiplexing
shangqi.ma.xidian@foxmail.com
(WDM) technology, multiple high-speed data streams can be
Hao Lan transmitted in a single fiber cable [10, 11], further improving
lanhao34@gmail.com
the bandwidth density and reducing cabling complexity and
Xiaoshan Yu costs in optical interconnection.
xsyu@xidian.edu.cn
Traditional network statically provides full bandwidth
Kun Wang between arbitrary Top-of-Rack (ToR) pairs, which can
kwang@mail.xidian.edu.cn
cover the worst-case communication patterns [12]. However,
1
State Key Laboratory of ISN, Xidian University, a fully provisioned topology consumes significant wiring
Xi’an 710071, People’s Republic of China overhead and energy consumption, and thus, it is impractica-
2
School of Computer Science, Xidian University, ble to deploy this topology, especially when topology scale
Xi’an 710071, People’s Republic of China

13
Vol.:(0123456789)

expands. Reconfigurable topology technology has aroused
widespread concern [13, 14], which utilizes OCS to dynami-
cally change link capacities, and allows for changing the
network topology to match the interconnection demands of
each application.
Even though OCS is capable of delivering significant
benefits, it inevitably incurs a non-negligible reconfiguration
penalty [15, 16], which can be up to tens of milliseconds in a
MEMS-based OCS network. On the contrary, the processing
time of EPS is only several nanoseconds. Therefore, hybrid
optical/electrical architectures [2, 3, 7, 17] are emerging
as an alternative to DPS-only networks, where EPS han-
dles dynamically changing traffic and OCS handles static
and long-lived traffic. However, network downtime due to
reconfiguration still happens whenever the interconnect state
changes [18], during which optical links are incapable of
transmitting data. Night and Day represent the time interval
when the network is being reconfigured and the time inter-
val when it can transmit data, respectively. To amortize the
inevitably long reconfiguring reconfiguration delay, existing
approaches generally set Day up to a few hundred millisec-
onds or even several seconds (far longer than Night), thereby
lengthening the reconfiguration cycle and diminishing the
impact of reconfiguration delays [19]. Nevertheless, most
packets can arrive at destination ToRs through optical links
in short slots. In that case, longer-term Day means more
optical resources will be wasted since many optical links are
occupied in vain in the rest of Day.
Aiming to improve the utilization of optical links in
MEMS-based OCS network, a relay-based schedule scheme
(RSS) is proposed in this paper. RSS leverages idle opti-
cal links to forward traffic through relay ToR, alleviating
the negative effects of long reconfiguration cycles in OCS
networks. In order to obtain the link state, we accordingly
propose an advertisement scheme. Furthermore, we also
propose a PFC-like scheme as an enhancement of RSS to
avoid bufferbloat.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Sect. 2,
we discuss the existing reconfigurable networks and explore
the problem of existing scheduling schemes. In Sect. 3, we
present the details of RSS and provide a modified scheme
to address bufferbloat issue. Section 4 evaluates the perfor-
mance of RSS by conducting extensive simulations. At last,
we conclude this paper in Sect. 5.
2 Related works
In this section, we introduce efforts that have been made
on reducing impacts of topology reconfiguration in OCS-
based architectures and further show how existing schedul-
ing schemes fail to utilize optical links efficiently.
13
Photonic Network Communications
Taking Helios for example, the centralized controller
supervises and periodically collects traffic demands between
different racks and then accordingly allocates optical links
to ToRs pairs with high communication demands. However,
the traffic demands information periodically collected by
the controllers are based on the instantaneous buffer queue
lengths of ToRs, leading to a mismatch between the real-
time traffic demands and current configuration. Besides,
existing proposed methods set the reconfiguration cycle as
dozens of times of reconfiguration delay, so that the inter-
val between reconfigurations can amortize the time spent
on demand collection, configuration calculation and OCS
switching [19].
Assuming the reconfiguration delay is 0.1 ms and the
reconfiguration cycle is ten times of it, we simulate the above
scheduling scheme in OMNeT++ simulator and record the
throughput during each cycle. As observed in Fig. 1, once
high-speed optical links are set up, most packets finish trans-
mitting within a short time slot at the beginning of Day,
while only a few packets keep transmitting through opti-
cal links in the remaining of reconfiguration cycle. Under
such circumstances, optical recourses are wasted since many
optical links are occupied in vain while there still are many
packets in ToR switches that cannot get allocated optical
links until next cycle, resulting in unacceptable performance
degradation in both throughput and latency.
Another kind of strategy is replacing MEMS-based
switches with faster optical devices, such as RotorNet [6]
and Mordia [4]. Those proposals are no longer subject to
slow reconfiguration speed. However, they either rely on
costly custom-designed OCSes, which is hard to imple-
ment in current data networks, or otherwise restrict to small
network scale. Therefore, we expect to reduce impacts of
reconfiguration only through straightforward software modi-
fications and guarantee the latency performance as well as
reduce the average FCTs.
Fig. 1  Utilization of optical link cannot stay high all the time during
one reconfiguration cycle
Photonic Network Communications

3 Relay‑based schedule scheme
In this section, we present a relay-based schedule scheme
(RSS) for OCS-based DCN, which can be easily imple-
mented in hybrid electrical/optical architectures. RSS
provides better connectivity of the optical network with-
out increasing the number of MEMS switches as it offers
each ToR the opportunity to communicate with multiple
indirectly connected ToRs. In our design, RSS is also com-
bined with an idle link notification scheme as well as a
bufferbloat avoidance scheme.
3.1 Overview
We attempt to address these issues mentioned in section II
from two aspects: (1) the measurement and collection of
traffic demands; (2) the OCS configuration.
In respect of the measurement and collection of traffic
demands, there have been considerable efforts in develop-
ing efficient traffic scheduling schemes, which leverage
centralized controllers to performance optical links alloca-
tion according to the periodically collected traffic informa-
tion. However, the traffic changes dynamically over time
so that there will be delay between traffic collection and
the real-time traffic, which will significantly degrade the
efficiency of scheduling schemes.
Based on the collected traffic demands, the controller
determines OCS configuration that provides optical links
between input ToRs and output ToRs in every reconfigura-
tion cycle. All of the OCS switches reconfigure synchro-
nously, during which no packet can be transmitted through
the optical link, resulting in a large number of queuing
delays and then degrading network latency performance.
Besides, long and constant Day interval in one reconfigura-
tion cycle leads to low efficiency of optical links since traffic
cannot saturate the whole Day, while variable Day interval
will inevitably result in a sophisticated configuration scheme
with high computational complexity.
Therefore, RSS still adopts constant Day interval in one
reconfiguration cycle, but adds relay mechanism to leverage
the optical links in idle state during the Day, which fully
utilizes the “wasted” bandwidth and improves the network
latency performance. When informed that optical links are
idle, source ToR can communicate with destination ToR
which is not directly connected, by transmitting to a relay
ToR directly connecting to destination ToR first.
Figure 2 shows OCS-based network adopting RRS and
how relay works. After finishing reconfiguration, ToR 1
is connected to ToR 3 and ToR 3 is connected to ToR 2
through optical links during this configuration cycle. If
adopting existing schemes, once data from ToR 1 to ToR 3
or data from ToR 3 to ToR 2 drain out, optical links between
them will be in idle state during the rest time of this Day.
And even if ToR 1 needs to communicate with ToR 2, it

T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T

T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T

ToR 3 ToR 2 ToR 1

H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H

H
T T T T

T T T T T T T T T T T T T

Fig. 2  ToR 1 transmits packet to ToR 2 through relay ToR 3 when optical links are idle

13

can only wait for optical links allocation in the next cycle.
However, when adopting RSS, ToR 1 can send data to ToR
2 via relay ToR 3 when traffic between ToR 1 and ToR 3
finishes transmitting, rather than waiting for allocation of
optical links until the next Day.
Despite the existence of two-hop seems to be a kind of
bandwidth waste, such trade-off is acceptable consider-
ing that without RSS the second-hop bandwidth will be
unexploited anyway in remaining time of a Day. Therefore,
adopting relay actually reuses the optical resources and pro-
vides connection for mice flows and bursty communications.
3.2 Relay advertisement
Typically, in OCS-based data center control plane, a cen-
tralized controller periodically collects network-wide traffic
demands, so that it can compute topology and allocate opti-
cal links basing on traffic information. The configuration
results of the optical links will be sent to both OCS switches
and ToR switches so that they can perform transmission.
In our proposal, for the purpose of making full utilization
of idle optical links, source ToRs are allowed to send their
traffic to relay ToRs, which will then take charge of relaying
the traffic to destination ToRs. In that case, the ToRs and
centralized controller need to be subtly modified so that idle
link information can be generated and spread to the whole
network.
The centralized controller not only aggregates traffic
demands from all ToRs and allocates optical links accord-
ingly, but also forwards the idle link information collected
from relay ToRs to the other ToRs. Any ToRs which are
directly connected with source ToRs through optical links
can be considered as relay. Whenever an optical link turns
into the idle state, the relay ToR will inform the centralized
controller of the idle link information. Then, the centralized
controller forwards information to source ToRs and allows
them to leverage the idle optical link via the relay ToR. The
whole procedure is what we call Relay Advertisement.
It is worthy of noting that only the source ToRs which are
directly connected to relay ToR can leverage the idle opti-
cal link when informed of link information. Figure 3 shows
the pseudocode of centralized controller. When there exists
direct optical link between source and destination ToR, there
is no need for relay. Otherwise, the centralized controller
will determine which ToRs are qualified to leverage the idle
links according to the existing optical circuit.
3.3 The internal routing process of ToR
In each ToR switch, there are three types of ports, includ-
ing downlink ports (i.e., ports that are connected to serv-
ers within the same rack), electrical ports connected to
EPS and optical ports connected to OCS. Connectivity
13
Photonic Network Communications
Controller Relay Advertisement Process
Input : The relay ToR R The destination ToR D
The source ToR S
begin
for ( ToR S in all ToRs)
if ( ToR S has optical link to ToR R)
if ( ToR R is ToR D )
/*no need for relaying */
else
Notify ToR S send traffic to ToR D via ToR R
endif
endfor
end
Fig. 3  Pseudocode of controller
of downlink ports and electrical ports remains unchanged
throughout the configuration, and we merely focus on how
to allocate optical ports in each cycle.
For convenience in the following illustration, we define
traffic that comes from current ToR to a directly connected
ToR in optical network as direct traffic (DTra), and traffic
destined to a remote ToR as relay traffic (RTra). Note that
the RTra from source ToR is recognized as DTra when
arriving at relay ToR since there remains only one hop to
its destination. We set two classes of priority to optical
ports in order to distinguish DTra from RTra, and RTra
has lower priority since it consumes bandwidth twice as
much as DTra does.
During Night interval, all optical links are in the stage of
reconfiguration so that inter-rack traffic transmits through
electrical network and the routing tables in optical ports
keep vacant. Taking ToR 1 in Fig. 2 for example, when
receiving the link establishment information from the con-
troller, ToR 1 changes the output port into corresponding
optical port with the highest priority of in the routing table
when optical link between ToR 1 and destination ToR is
allocated, as shown in Table 1. When receiving the relay
advertisement, source ToR estimates whether the optical link
to destination exists or not (regardless of directly connected
link or indirectly connected link). If it already has an optical
link to the destination ToR, the source ToR will ignore the
advertisement. Otherwise, the source ToR will change the
output port to optical port with lower priority (relay) in the
Table 1  Routing table of ToR 1 Forward table
after establishment
Destination Output port
Rack 3 Optical port 3
Rack 2 Electrical port
Photonic Network Communications

routing table according to the destination rack, as shown in

Table 2. The routing process of ToR after receiving the relay
advertisement is shown in Fig. 4.
During the Day, ToR will forward all arrived packets
according to the routing table until it receives a tearing-down
packet. Once the OCS is reconfiguring, ToRs will reset all
entries in routing tables.

3.4 Bufferbloat

Traffic transmitted from different ToRs to the same destina-

tion tends to compete for the same optical link as well as
relay ToR [20], which may result in packets accumulating
in the buffer of relay ToR. With the expansion of network
scale, bufferbloat is certain to arise since more packets are
transmitted simultaneously to same relay ToR. When there Fig. 4  Routing process of ToR
exists bufferbloat, excess buffering inside relay ToR causes
high latency and unpredictable packet transmission delay,
further reducing the overall network throughput. high throughput at substantially lower cost, rather than
To avoid the bufferbloat problem, we propose a PFC-like improve topology connectivity. Referring to n as the number
mechanism as a supplementary to the relay scheme, shown in of MEMS switches in OCS-based network, the number of
Fig. 5. The mechanism controls the buffer occupancy of each ToRs which each ToR can communicate with is at most n.
relay ToR by setting a threshold for the buffer. Once the buffer While RSS provides the opportunity for each ToR to com-
occupancy is larger/smaller than max/min threshold, the relay municate with ToRs through relay and improves the topol-
ToR will send a PAUSE/RESUME frame to the controller, ogy connectivity without increasing the MEMS switches in
respectively. As it does in relay advertisement, the centralized DCNs. Ideally, each ToR can communicate with n*(n − 1)
controller forwards the PAUSE/RESUME frame to the corre- other ToRs simultaneously in one cycle. As shown in Fig. 6,
sponding ToRs, so that these ToRs can stop/continue transmit- we evaluate the actual connectivity in MEMS-based net-
ting to the relay ToR. Besides the threshold in buffer occupy, works with different scale, which is lower than ideal con-
we also set a time threshold, before which all the ToRs will stop nectivity. However, the connectivity in RRS-based network
sending packets to the relay ToR. Time threshold can ensure
that most of these packets in the buffer can be consumed and
transmitted to the destination before Night approaches.

4 Evaluation

In this section, we evaluate the connectivity of OCS-based

DCN employing RSS. We also evaluate the performance of
RSS through extensive simulations in OMNET++ simulator.

4.1 Connectivity

Normally, the introduction of reconfigurable optical circuit

switches is to handle massive traffic and potentially provide

Table 2  Routing table of ToR 1 after relay advertisement

Forward table
Destination Output port

Rack 3 Optical port 3

Rack 2 Optical port 3 (relay)
Fig. 5  Bufferbloat avoidance mechanism

13

Fig. 6  Connectivity in different network sizes
is still higher than that in non-RSS network, since the link
in RRS-based network equals the direct link combined with
relay link.
4.2 Performance evaluation
Using OMNeT++ simulator to evaluate the performance
of RSS, we conduct extensive packet-level simulations. We
consider a 100-server Helios as our baseline OCS architec-
ture, and traffic aggregating from multiple servers forms at
ten 10 GigE ToRs. There are 10 servers in each rack, with
10 GigE links connected to the ToR switch. There are one
10 GigE packet switch and three MEMS-based optical cir-
cuit switches in the core layer. And each ToR switch uses 40
GigE optical fibers and 10 GigE electrical links to connect
OCS switches and EPS, respectively, in the core layer.
The flow-based synthetic communication patterns are
applied for traffic generation. The traffic flow is generated
based on a Poisson process where 80% of the flows are
smaller than 10 kB and other flows vary from 100 kB to
tens of MB, according to [21]. Each server generates flows
following a Poisson process with varying mean arrival
rates to mimic different offered loads to the network. The
Fig. 7  RSS FCT performance with different offered loads
13
Photonic Network Communications
destination of a flow is generated randomly. The Night
duration includes delay of traffic demands collection,
optical links allocation calculation, communication with
ToRs and OCSes and OCS switching, which is set to 1 ms
in the simulation. And we set packets of controller mes-
sages during Day, including relay information, Pause and
Resume message, to 32 bits. The controller messages are
forwarded through 10 Gbps electrical links, so that the
transmission delay of them is 3.2 ns. We consider two
performances metrics: flow completion time (FCT) and
end-to-end (ETE) delay experienced by a packet.
Adopting RSS actually provides extra connection
between mice flows and bursty communications, so that
the FCT of mice flows can be significantly reduced. This
can be illustrated in Fig. 7a, which shows that the average
mice flow FCT in non-RSS Helios is from 1 to 15 ms,
while that in RSS-based Helios is from 0.9 to 2 ms, pro-
viding a reduction by up to 80%. This is mainly due to the
characteristics of mice flows: small bandwidth demands
but sporadic destinations. In non-RSS Helios, mice flows
get to their destinations only if they are allocated with
optical paths in current configuration cycles. Those failed
to get allocated have to compete for the electrical ports or
wait another cycle for the optical network to be reconfig-
ured. RSS provides high network connectivity and enables
the mice flows to be forwarded via idle optical paths in
current cycle. Therefore, in RSS-based Helios a portion
of mice flows reach their destinations ahead of time and
lower average FCT is achieved. In Fig. 7b, we observe that
average elephant flow FCT of non-RSS Helios and that
of RSS-based Helios increase at approximate rate, while
non-RSS Helios ranges from 8 to 23 ms and RSS Helios
ranges from 6 to 22 ms as packets in network increase. The
reason is that elephant flows need large and dense band-
width, and they can be incredibly likely to obtain the allo-
cated optical paths due to Edmonds algorithm adopted in
the controller. And when ToRs getting optical links finish
transmitting pretty early, a few elephant flows may get idle
links rather than wait for next reconfiguration cycle. The
Photonic Network Communications
Fig. 8  CDF of mice flow FCTs with and without RSS
Fig. 9  ETE packet delay with and without RSS
overall average FCT results lie in the range of 1.3–4.4 ms
for RSS-based Helios, which is much better compared to
the range of 1.8–14.5 ms for non-RSS Helios.
Figure 8 shows the CDF(cumulative distribution func-
tion) of mice flows for 5 k measurements. As is shown, in
non-RSS Helios, only 45% of the mice flows see FCT below
1 ms, and up to 10% of the mice flow FCTs lie in the range
of 7–15 ms. By contrast, in RSS-based Helios, 75% of the
mice flows FCTs are below 1 ms, which is much higher than
non-RSS Helios. Furthermore, the mice flow FCTs lying in
the range of 3–10 ms only account for 10%.
In addition, we evaluate the ETE (end-to-end) packet
delay. As shown in Fig. 9, the delay of non-RSS Helios
ranges from 2.6 to 8.4 ms before it gets saturated at offered
load of 0.8. While for RSS-based Helios, it maintains a rela-
tively low range from 2.5 to 7.9 ms before it gets saturated
at offered load of 0.8, providing a delay reduction of 50%
at offered load of 0.5. It is also observed that the delay in
RSS-based Helios increases slightly faster after offered load
of 0.6, since increasing packets make most of the optical
paths highly utilized and more packets wait in relay ToR
buffer, and thus, the opportunity to transmit through delay is
decreased. Fortunately, the delay performance of RSS-based
Helios still precedes that of non-RSS due to the adoption of
bufferbloat avoidance mechanism.
5 Conclusion
Optical circuit switch has been introduced to data center
due to its capacity of providing reconfigurable topology, as
well as potentially achieving high bandwidth requirements
at low per-bit overhead. Although OCS delivers variety of
attractive properties, challenge still arises since it inevitably
incurs non-negligible reconfiguration delay. Typically, exist-
ing schemes amortize the long switching time by reconfig-
uring the OCS at intervals of a few 100 s of milliseconds
or even several seconds, which fails to utilize optical links
efficiently, thus incurring the degradation of network per-
formance. We present a novel scheduling scheme named
RSS for OCS-based networks, which offers each ToR the
opportunity to communicate with multiple indirectly con-
nected ToRs through relay ToR. RSS fully unitizes idle opti-
cal links and delivers significant benefits for network con-
nectivity without increasing the number of OCS switches.
Furthermore, we also design a PFC-like mechanism as a
supplementary to RSS, in charge of controlling the buffer
occupancy of relay ToR thus avoiding bufferbloat. The
extensive experimental results show that RSS delivers sig-
nificant performance improvement in mice flow FCTs and
benefits slightly on elephant flow FCTs.
Acknowledgements  This work was supported in part by the National
Science Foundation of China under Grant 61634004, the Fundamen-
tal Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant Nos.
JB190105 and JB180309, the Key Research and Development Plan of
Shaanxi province under Grant 2017ZDCXL-GY-05-01, china postdoc-
toral science foundation No. 2018M633465.
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optical/electrical switch. Photon Netw. Commun. 23(1), 92–108 Information System from Xidian University
(2012) in 2016. Now he is doing postdoctoral pro-
18. Cao, Z., Kodialam, M., Lakshman, T.V.: Joint static and dynamic gramme in the State key lab of ISN, Xidian
traffic scheduling in data center networks. IEEE/ACM Trans. Net- University. His main research interests
work. 24(3), 1908–1918 (2016) include optical interconnected networks and
19. Porter, G., Strong, R., Farrington, N., et al.: Integrating microsec- data center networks.
ond circuit switching into the data center. In: Proceedings of the
ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference on SIGCOMM. ACM (2013) Kun Wang  received the B.E. degree and M.E.
20. Kandula, S., Sengupta, S., Greenberg, A.G., et al.: The nature degree in Computer Science and Technology
of data center traffic: measurements and analysis. In: ACM SIG- from Xidian University, in 2003 and 2006,
COMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM respectively. Now she is a lecturer in the
(2009) Department of Computer Science, Xidian
21. Roy, A., Zeng, H., Bagga, J., et al.: Inside the social network’s University. Her current interests include
(datacenter) network. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. high-performance computing and cloud
45(5), 123–137 (2015) computing and the network virtualization
technology.
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