Optical interconnection networks for data centers

The rise of cloud computing and other emerging web applications has increased significantly the network traffic inside the data centers. In this paper we present the future requirements of data centers such as the need for higher bandwidth and the need for more energy-efficient interconnection network inside the data centers. This need comes both from the exponential rise of the network traffic inside the data centers and the limitations of the power consumption in the data center infrastructures. Furthermore, in this paper we discuss the rise of optical interconnection network for data centers that have been proposed in the research literature to address the limitation of the current interconnects. We present the main benefits and drawbacks of each proposed scheme and finally we discuss the research directions in the domain of optical interconnects for data centers.