Optical Switching in Next-Generation Data Centers

Abstract

The leading content provider companies like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon installed mega-data centers that contain hundreds of thousands of servers in very large scale. The current data center systems are organized in the form of the hierarchal tree structure based on bandwidth-limited electronic switches. Modern data center systems face a number of issues like high power consumption, limited bandwidth availability, server connectivity, energy and cost efficiency, traffic complexity, etc. One of the most feasible solution of these issues is the use of optical switching technologies in the core of data center systems. In this chapter a brief description about the modern data center system is presented, and some prominent optical packet switch architectures are also presented in this chapter with their pros and cons.