Reconfigurable optical star network architecture for multicast media production data centres

Passive optical star networks have attractive properties for multicast traffic in data centres, but are limited in transmission bandwidth per node due to sharing a finite total throughput capacity. By adding reconfigurable switching elements to the core of an optical star topology, simulations show that the expected transmission rate per node can be increased by 26–40% (at 90% and 70% network load respectively). The proposed architecture shows no loss of multicast functionality compared to a single passive optical star, and only 7.1% increase in power consumption. Network throughput is shown to be highly dependent on the network traffic pattern, with simulations of multicast zonal media production traffic showing 6 times greater throughput than random or hotspot traffic models.