KSII TRANSACTIONS ON INTERNET AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS VOL. 8, NO. 11, Nov. 2014 3955 Copyright © 2014 KSII Datacenter-Oriented Elastic Optical Networks: Architecture, Operation, and Solutions Limei Peng 1 , Yantao Sun 2* , Min Chen 3 and Kiejin Park 1 1 Department of Industrial Engineering, Ajou University, Suwon 443-749, South Korea. Email: auroraplm@ajou.ac.kr, kiejin5268@gmail.com 2 School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, China Email : ytsun@bjtu.edu.cn 3 School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University, China Email : minchen2012@hust.edu.cn *Corresponding author: Yantao Sun Received June 21, 2014; revised August 22, 2014; accepted September 16, 2014; published November 30, 2014 Abstract With the exponentially increasing Internet traffic and emergence of more versatile and heterogeneous applications, the design of datacenter networks (DCNs) is subject to unprecedented requirements for larger capacity and more flexible switching granularities. Envisioning Optical-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM) as a promising candidate for such a scenario, we motivate the use of O-OFDM as the underlying switching technology in order to provide sufficient switching capacity and elastic bandwidth allocation. For this purpose, this article reviews the recent progresses of DCN deployment and assesses the scenario where the O-OFDM transmission and switching technology is employed in the underlying transport plane. We discuss the key issues of the datacenter-oriented O-OFDM optical networks, and in particular, elaborate on a number of open issues and solutions including system interconnection architecture, routing and resource assignment, survivability, and energy-efficiency. Keywords: Datacenter Networks (DCN), Optical-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM), Interconnection This work was supported in part by the International Science and Technology Collaboration Program (2014DFT10070) funded by China Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), and Hubei Provincial Provincial Key Project under grant 2013CFA051. http://dx.doi.org/10.3837/tiis.2014.11.016