Hub-and-Spoke Networking Architecture for the AI Era

Communication infrastructure was primarily designed for human-to-human or server-to-human communication.

But the AI era introduces entirely new communication patterns such as AI-to-AI and AI-to-robot, bringing infrastructure requirements that conventional networking models struggle to meet.

Networking architecture changes are addressing this. Digital coherent optics has extended a single optical hop to thousands of kilometers, while coherent pluggables brings this capability to smaller sites.

This enables hub-and-spoke networking, a more flexible, manageable, controllable and cost-effective infrastructure for the age of AI.

Communications Infrastructure Transformation

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises huge opportunities for enterprises. But to take full advantage of AI’s potential, businesses need to understand the changes underway in the underlying technology and what it means for their networking investment decisions.  

AI requires infrastructure that is predictable, manageable and responsive. In an AI environment, communication expands beyond human-to-human, or even server-to-human, to encompass AI-to-AI or AI-to-robot. Machines exchange information continuously and at extremely high frequency. AI workloads span multiple locations and systems that must work together.

Predictable performance is essential for these tightly coordinated workloads, and infrastructure needs to respond dynamically to where compute and resources are available.

What does this mean for businesses? It means they should be considering their networking in terms of distance, determinism, manageability and architectural simplicity. Networking decisions are not only about cost and bandwidth anymore.

From Truck Distance to Flight Distance

One key architectural change is a dramatic increase in how far data can travel in a single optical hop.

It’s like what happened in the transportation industry: when it became possible to ship goods “flight distance” rather than just “truck distance,” it affected more than speed to delivery. It changed where hubs were located, how networks were designed, and how businesses operated.

This is what’s happening with networking. An advanced method of transmitting data through fiber optic cables, known as digital coherent optics, has extended the reach of a single optical hop from truck distance to flight distance.

The technology has been widely adopted in backbone infrastructure, enabling a massive increase in backbone capacity.

Direct Optical Flight from the Edge

Digital coherent optics made backbone infrastructures far more efficient, but the final stretch to access locations and hubs still relied on traditional hop-by-hop networking.

Then coherent pluggables changed the model. Coherent optical transceivers that can be plugged directly into user equipment such as routers became commercially available. These transceivers, known as coherent pluggables, enable long-reach optical data transmission directly from user sites, i.e., direct optical flight from the edge.

Hub-and-Spoke Networking: A New Architecture for the AI Era

Direct optical flight from the edge makes it more practical to build flatter, simpler hub-and-spoke networks rather than relying on many layers of intermediate infrastructure. This makes the infrastructure predictable, manageable, and responsive. All of this is important for AI communication.

AI-to-AI and AI-to-robot communication requires massive amounts of data to be exchanged with latency close to the physical propagation delay. This requires packets to be transferred with minimal buffering and near-zero packet loss. A flatter hub-and-spoke network architecture makes it easier to meet these requirements.

The business benefits of hub and spoke include a clearer view and better control over the infrastructure, and much simpler operations with fewer layers. Longer distance connectivity can allow resources, such as GPUs, to be shared across regions. This also contributes to energy efficiency. The shorter paths, centralized management, and reduced complexity of hub-and-spoke architectures vastly reduce the amount of power needed, even as AI model sizes continue to increase.

Advancing AI Infrastructure Through Open Collaboration

Direct optical flights from the edge require transceivers and network equipment from multiple vendors to interoperate. Without such interoperability, AI infrastructure risks becoming fragmented into vendor-specific silos.

The IOWN Global Forum is working to prevent this by defining an open architecture for hub-and-spoke networking. The next-generation architecture consists of two foundational layers: Open All-Photonics Network (APN) and Deterministic Network (DN) which together aim to provide the foundational networking architecture required for AI-era infrastructure.

Network Infrastructure of the Future of AI

Last century the advent of flight changed the structure of transportation networks. Today, flight-distance connectivity is similarly enabling a different way of designing infrastructure.

As AI transforms infrastructure requirements, organizations should evaluate networking not only in terms of bandwidth and cost per bit, but also distance, determinism, manageability, and architectural simplicity.

Coherent pluggables play an important role. More than a simple incremental advance in optical networking, they are key to enabling the AI infrastructure.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Infrastructure
• Photonics