Adaptive Optical Network Scheduling for Bursty Cloud Application Traffic
Keywords:
adaptive optical networks; cloud data centers; bursty traffic; scheduling; optical circuit switching; resource governance; sustainability; robustnessAbstract
Cloud applications generate highly variable traffic that alternates between long periods of modest demand and intense bursts caused by data-parallel computation, user-facing request surges, storage synchronization, and distributed machine learning. Conventional electrical packet-switched data center networks handle this variability through overprovisioning, buffering, and rapid statistical multiplexing, but these strategies increasingly encounter energy, latency, and scaling limits. Optical networking offers high capacity and low loss, yet static optical provisioning cannot respond efficiently to bursty cloud workloads. This paper examines adaptive optical network scheduling as a socio-technical infrastructure problem rather than a purely physical-layer optimization. It develops an architectural framework that combines optical circuit and packet domains, telemetry-driven control, demand prediction, cross-layer coordination, and policy-aware resource governance. The analysis emphasizes structural trade-offs among reconfiguration latency, spectral efficiency, fairness, robustness, and sustainability. It also considers deployment pathways in brownfield data centers, the role of software-defined control, and the governance challenges that arise when optical capacity becomes a shared and dynamically allocated resource. Case illustrations from hyperscale data centers, edge clouds, high-performance computing, and latency-sensitive services show that no single scheduling model dominates across all contexts. Instead, adaptive optical scheduling must be designed as a modular capability that can shift between circuit-like predictability, packet-like elasticity, and hybrid modes according to workload class, service-level objectives, and operational constraints. The paper concludes that successful adoption depends as much on institutional coordination, transparent policy, and energy accounting as on advances in photonic switching and control algorithms.
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