A multiport microsecond optical circuit switch for data center networking

Abstract

We experimentally evaluate the network-level switching time of a functional 23-host prototype hybrid optical circuit-switched/electrical packet-switched network for datacenters called Mordia (Microsecond Optical Research Datacenter Interconnect Architecture). This hybrid network uses a standard electrical packet switch and an optical circuit-switched architecture based on a wavelength-selective switch that has a measured mean port-to-port network reconfiguration time of 11.5 μs including the signal acquisition by the network interface card. Using multiple parallel rings, we show that this architecture can scale to support the large bisection bandwidth required for future datacenters. © 2013 IEEE.