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Optical data center networks are becoming an increasingly promising solution to solve the bottlenecks faced by electrical networks, such as low transmission bandwidth, high wiring complexity, and unaffordable power consumption. However, the optical circuit switching (OCS) network is not flexible enough to carry the traffic burst while the optical packet switching (OPS) network cannot solve the packet contention in an efficient way. To this end, an improved switching strategy named OPS with multi-hop Negative Acknowledgement (MPNACK) is proposed. This scheme uses a feedback mechanism, rather than the buffering structure, to handle the optical packet contention. The collided packet is treated as a NACK packet and sent back to the source server. When the sender receives this NACK packet, it knows a collision happens in the transmission path and a retransmission procedure is triggered. Overall, the OPS-NACK scheme enables a reliable transmission in the buffer-less optical network. Furthermore, with this scheme, the expensive and energy-hungry elements, optical or electrical buffers, can be removed from the optical interconnects, thus a more scalable and cost-efficient network can be constructed for cloud computing data centers.
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