The goal of the LIGHTNESS project is to develop data center infrastructure solutions in anticipation of the emergence of new technologies and 5G standards, as well as the surge in mobile traffic. The increasing use of mobile devices, along with the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), will substantially increase mobile data traffic in 2020. Future networks will need to support a vast number of different mobile devices with unprecedented demands for transmission speed, acceptable latency, number of supported devices, comprehensive traffic control mechanisms, and highly dynamic management of the physical and virtual resources available to operators.
Data centers are heavily impacted by these new traffic patterns and will need to adapt to 5G accordingly. Project LIGHTNESS leverages benefits such as improved energy efficiency, speed, and quality of service that optical transmission can provide within and between data centers, creating a more dynamic and manageable infrastructure for a 5G future.
The project results showcase a new, all-optical, software-defined data center where Optical Packet Switching (OCS) and Optical Circuit Switching (OPS) technologies are integrated with a software-defined network (SDN) controller, resulting in a scalable and programmable data center architecture. The new traffic control techniques in the optical data center designed by LIGHTNESS could enable operators to manage all data center resources more dynamically, leading to cost reductions and end-to-end service improvements for end users.
The project focuses on integrating OCS and OPS technologies as a mechanism to combine different traffic patterns. Initial tests of the prototype presented in Valencia demonstrate data transmission speeds of 40 to 100 Gigabits per second across a chain comprising a programmable hybrid interface card (OCS/OPS), an OPS switch, an on-demand OCS switch, a hybrid ToR (OCS/OPS) switch, and an all-optical ToR switch. Control of this optical data plane has been applied through the SDN controller based on an extended version of OpenDaylight, fully integrated with the aforementioned optical devices.
“Both LIGHTNESS prototypes for software and hardware are ready for deployment,” commented Matteo Biancani, Commercial Director of Interoute Italy and coordinator of the LIGHTNESS project. “What we are presenting these days is a project that is not only innovative and concrete, but also immediately relevant for addressing the evolving telecommunications market and for better managing the arrival of the 5G standard.”
The LIGHTNESS project, now almost complete, has received €2.44 million in funding from the European Commission under the 7th Structure Programme for Research and Development, and involves seven partners from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The LIGHTNESS project partners are: Interoute (Italy), Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands), Nextworks (Italy), University of Bristol (United Kingdom), Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), and Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain).
