Cloud service providers use replication across geographically distributed data centers to improve end-to-end performance as well as to offer high reliability under failures. Content replication often involves the transfer of huge data sets over the wide area network and demands high backbone transport capacity. In this paper, we discuss how a Globally Reconfigurable Intelligent Photonic Network (GRIPhoN) between data centers could improve operational flexibility for cloud service providers. The proposed GRIPhoN architecture is an extension of earlier work [34] and can provide a bandwidth-on-demand service ranging from low data rates (e.g., 1 Gbps) to high data rates (e.g., 10-40 Gbps). The inter-data center communication network which is currently statically provisioned could be dynamically configured based on demand. Today's backbone optical networks can take several weeks to provision a customer's private line connection. GRIPhoN would enable cloud operators to dynamically set up and tear down their connections (sub-wavelength or wavelength rates) within a few minutes. GRIPhoN also offers cost-effective restoration capabilities at wavelength rates and automated bridge-and-roll of private line connections to minimize the impact of planned maintenance activities.

We describe the architecture, performance analysis and simulation result of a novel switching paradigm for optical WDM networks called Just-In-Time Optical Burst Switching (JIT-OBS) designed for ultra-low-latency transport of data-bursts across an optical WDM network. It combines the desirable features of circuit-switching and packet-switching, and features an out-of-band signaling scheme on a separate control channel with explicit feedback on delivery of data-bursts. We provide a performance analysis and simulation of the JIT-OBS approach, and compare its performance with those of circuit-switching and packet-switching approaches. We find that it has the best latency performance among the different switching mechanisms, and it has a better throughput performance than circuit-switching, and its performance is insensitive to network propagation delays.

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