Abstract
The use of architectures that implement optical switching without any need of optoelectronic conversion allows us to overcome the limits imposed by today’s electronic backplane, such as power consumption and dissipation, as well as power supply and footprint requirements. We propose a ring-resonator based optical backplane for router line-card interconnection. In particular we investigate how the scalability of the architecture is affected by the following parameters: number of line cards, switching-element round-trip losses, frequency drifting due to thermal variations, and waveguide-crossing effects. Moreover, to quantify the signal distortions introduced by filtering operations, the bit error rate for the different parameter conditions are shown in case of an on-off keying non-return-to-zero (OOK-NRZ) input signal at 10 Gb/s.
Highlights
The deployment of High Performance Switches and Routers (HPSRs) capable of managing huge aggregated bandwidth is becoming mandatory to address traffic growth-rate projections [1]
RR; (2) we introduce a new methodology for scalability analysis based on accurate transfer function evaluation; and (3) we confirm the feasibility of the architecture via analysis of the bit error rate (BER)
We have investigated the feasibility of our backplane design considering typical implementation issues: number of line cards, switching element-round trip losses, frequency drifting due to thermal variations and waveguide-crossing effects
Summary
The LCs host the hardware implementing low-layer functions (transceiver, framer, etc.) and other network-processing functions (address lookup, packet classification, buffer management, scheduling, etc.). To the HPSR, LCs are interconnected via a backplane [2]. OI can be deployed between racks (rack-to-rack), between line-cards inside a rack (card-to-card or backplane), between chips of a line-card (chip-to-chip), or even between the different cores of a single chip (on-chip). In this context, we decided to investigate the card-to-card OI. In [6], authors propose different RR-based backplane fabrics focusing on a power-budget scalability analysis. Our procedure goes beyond the simple power budget and Cross-Talk (XT) analyses since it accounts for waveguide dispersion effects, which may have a non-negligible impact in all-optical backplanes
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