Abstract
Data centers have become the major technology for collecting and processing
information. The data-rates required for transferring the information through
the server's backplane has been increasing from year to year at an almost
exponential pace. Therefore a technology-shift from the electronic to the
optic domain has already been initiated in order to meet the required data-rate
demands for next-generation servers. The future technology that is analyzed
in the paper is free space optics (FSO). FSO technology uses laser links between
the server cards and the backplane and provides a lower bound on propagation
delay due to the low index of refraction of air, when compared with waveguide
or fiber technologies. However, turbulence occurs due to the high temperature
of the chips and to ventilation inside the server, which results in deterioration
of the communication performance. In this paper, we examine the feasibility
of wavelength diversity as a means to mitigate the effect of turbulence on
the server communication link performance. It is shown that using the diversity
scheme cuts the outage probability by half for the same total transmitter
power by comparison with the single wavelength scheme. Therefore, the power
consumption (and operational costs) of the data center could be reduced dramatically
if a wavelength diversity scheme were adopted. The authors believe that this
is the first time that a laboratory experiment has been performed modeling
a server backplane with FSO communication using wavelength diversity.
© 2012 IEEE
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