Design and evaluation of data and control plane architectures for intra data centres connectivity services

[ANGLÈS] Emerging applications for Data Centers like Cloud Computing, High Performance Computing and Big Data are based on the cooperation of thousands of servers which are connected through a Data Center Network. All these applications require the servers of the Data Center to exchange huge amounts of data between them. In order to withstand such high throughput the Data Center Network must provide ultra-large capacity. Moreover, low latencies are also mandatory, especially when a tight synchronization between servers is required. Several forecasts predict a threefold increase in the global Data Center traffic between the years 2012 and 2017. Furthermore, a 76% of such traffic is expected to be produced inside Data Centers. Unfortunately, current multi-tier hierarchical tree-based Data Center Network architectures which rely on Ethernet or Inifiniband are neither flexible nor scalable enough to meet the expected growth previsions. Such limitations have mandated a renewed investigation into the introduction of ultra-highbandwidth and low-latency optical technologies in Data Center Networks. Several architectures for Data Center Networks have been proposed but none of them provides a high degree of scalability at a reasonable cost. Following these trends, LIGHTNESS, an European Framework Programme 7 project, has the objective to design, implement and experimentally demonstrate a high-performance Data Center Network infrastructure for future Data Centers by employing innovative optical switching and transmission solutions. In this thesis a new all-optical Data Center Network architecture envisioned within the LIGHTNESS project is introduced and its performance is benchmarked against other solutions