Recent advances in fast optical switching show promise in meeting the high goodput and low latency requirements of datacenter networks. We present NegotiaToR, a simple network architecture for optical reconfigurable DCNs that utilizes on-demand scheduling to handle dynamic traffic. In NegotiaToR, racks exchange scheduling messages through an in-band control plane and distributedly calculate non-conflicting paths from binary traffic demand information. Optimized for incasts, it also provides opportunities to bypass scheduling delays. NegotiaToR is compatible with prevalent flat topologies, and is tailored towards a minimalist design for on-demand reconfigurable DCNs, enhancing practicality. Through large-scale simulations, we show that NegotiaToR achieves both small mice flow completion time and high goodput on two representative flat topologies, especially under heavy loads. Particularly, the flow completion time of mice flows is one to two orders of magnitude better than the state-of-the-art traffic-oblivious reconfigurable DCN design.

Recent advances in fast optical switching technology show promise in meeting the high goodput and low latency requirements of datacenter networks (DCN). We present NegotiaToR, a simple network architecture for optical reconfigurable DCNs that utilizes on-demand scheduling to handle dynamic traffic. In NegotiaToR, racks exchange scheduling messages through an in-band control plane and distributedly calculate non-conflicting paths from binary traffic demand information. Optimized for incasts, it also provides opportunities to bypass scheduling delays. NegotiaToR is compatible with prevalent flat topologies, and is tailored towards a minimalist design for on-demand reconfigurable DCNs, enhancing practicality. Through large-scale simulations, we show that NegotiaToR achieves both small mice flow completion time (FCT) and high goodput on two representative flat topologies, especially under heavy loads. Particularly, the FCT of mice flows is one to two orders of magnitude better than the state-of-the-art traffic-oblivious reconfigurable DCN design.

Optical switching technology has developed fast in recent years, which has the potential to provide high good put as well as low latency in reconfigurable data center networks (RDCN). However, existing optical RDCN proposals fail to balance good put, latency, and design complexity well. In this paper, we introduce NegotiaToR, a simple optical RDCN architecture. NegotiaToR utilizes on-demand scheduling to ensure high performance and reduces possible deployment complexity with an in-band control protocol to do the schedule distributedly. Our preliminary evaluation shows that NegotiaToR outperforms the state-of-the-art optical RDCN proposal under similar complexity in both goodput and flow completion time (FCT).