ABSTRACT
As the availability of high-speed Internet access is increasing at a rapid pace, distributed computing systems that are able to support a large variety of existing and upcoming applications are gaining increased popularity. Over the last decade, large-scale computer networks supporting both communication and computation were extensively employed to run distributed applications that deal with customer support, internet control processes, web content presentation, file sharing and new emerging applications such as UHD IPTV, 3D gaming, virtual worlds etc. In addition to the increased expectations from residential and business users, new requirements arising by scientific applications necessitate the deployment of high-performance data centers incorporating significant computing e.g., storage, processing power, memory, and network resources. This introduces an increase in the scale of information processing from Petabyes of Internet data to Exabytes at the end of this decade [1]. Traditionally, data center constellations used to support this type of information processing are locally installed at the customer site. However, this solution suffers from several limitations: including: a) heavy instrumentation on IT infrastructure and personnel needs, b) increased operational and maintenance costs, c) limited reliability etc. To address these issues cloud computing has been adopted as the natural evolution of traditional data centers, in which access to computing resources is provided on an on-demand basis. In this case, customers gain access to remote computing resources that they do not have to own and are charged for this elastic type of service based on the utilization level of the required resources. However, cloud computing services need to be supported by specific IT resources that may be remotely and geographically distributed, requiring connectivity through a very high capacity and increased flexibility and dynamicity network. A strong candidate to support these needs is optical networking due to its inherent abundant capacity, long reach transmission capabilities and recent technology advancements including dynamic control planes, elastic technologies etc. In this context, an infrastructure comprising converged optical network and IT resources that are jointly optimized in terms of infrastructure design and operation can be envisioned as the suitable solution to support the Future Internet.
