End-to-End 1024-Port Optical Packet Switching With 25 Gb/s Burst-Mode Reception for Data Centers

Abstract

Despite the fact that Optical Packet Switching (OPS) emerges as a promising solution for future Data Center (DC) networks, towards increasing capacity and radix, while retaining sub-μs latency performance, the requirement for ultra-fast burst-mode reception has been a serious restraining factor. We attempt to overcome this limitation and demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, an end-to-end optical packet switch link through the 1024-port 25.6 Tb/s Hipoλaos OPS, featuring burst-mode reception with <50 ns locking time. The switch performance for unicast traffic is evaluated via Bit-Error-Rate measurements and error-free performance at 10−9 is reported for all validated port-combinations, with a mean power penalty of 2.88 dB. Moreover, multicast flows from two different ports of the switch were successfully received validating the architecture's credentials for efficient multicast packet delivery. Taking one step further towards a realistic evaluation of an OPS-enabled DC, a simulation analysis was conducted, proving that low-latency performance, including the burst-mode reception time-overhead, can be successfully realized in a Hipoλaos-switched DC with up-to 100% throughput for a variety of traffic profiles.

Keywords

• All-digital clock and data recovery (AD-CDR)
• burst mode reception
• Data Centers
• optical multicast
• Optical Buffering
• Optical Packet Switching