TY - JOUR TI - End-to-end real-time demonstration of the slotted, SDN-controlled nephele optical datacenter network AU - Tokas, K. AU - Patronas, G. AU - Spatharakis, C. AU - Bakopoulos, P. AU - Kyriakos, A. AU - Landi, G. AU - Zahavi, E. AU - Christodoulopoulos, K. AU - Aziz, M. AU - Pitwon, R. AU - Gallico, D. AU - Reisis, D. AU - Varvarigos, E. AU - Avramopoulos, H. JO - IEEE Photonics Journal PY - 2020 VL - 7 TODO - 2 SP - null PB - MDPI AG SN - null TODO - 10.3390/PHOTONICS7020044 TODO - null TODO - The NEPHELE hybrid electro-optical datacenter network (DCN) architecture is proposed as a dynamic network solution to provide high capacity, scalability, and cost efficiency in comparison to the existing DCN infrastructures. The details of the NEPHELE DCN architecture and its various key parts are introduced, and the performance of its implementation is evaluated through an end-to-end NEPHELE demonstrator, which was built at the National Technical University of Athens. Several communication scenarios are demonstrated in real time, exploiting a scalable optical data-plane architecture with a software-defined network (SDN) control plane capable of slotted operation for dynamic allocation of network resources. Real-time end-to-end functionality and integration of various software and hardware components are verified in a six-host prototype datacenter cluster. © 2020 by the authors. ER -