Optical Switching for Data Center Networks

Abstract

Cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and Big Data applications are imposing stringent requirements on communications within warehouse-scale data centers (DC) in terms of high bandwidth, low latency, and massive interconnectivity. Traditional DC networks based on electronic switching use hierarchical tree-structured topologies that introduce communication bottlenecks and require high energy consumption. Thus, to enable scalable growth both in the number of connected endpoints and in the exchanged traffic volume, novel architectural and technological innovations have to be investigated. Optical switching technologies are attractive due to their transparency to data rate and data format, and enable energy-efficient network architectures that eliminate layers of power-consuming optoelectronic transceivers. In particular, new architectures that exploit optical circuit switching (opticalcircuit switching (OCS)), optical packet switching (optical packetswitching (OPS)), and optical burst switching (optical burstswitching (OBS)) technologies have been widely investigated recently for intra-DC networks. This chapter reports on the technologies used to implement OCS, OPS, and OBS nodes, together with recently investigated and demonstrated optical data center network (data center network (DCN)) architectures.