Synergistic Switch Control Enabled Optical Data Center Networks

Abstract

Optical switching, which benefits from high bandwidth and low latency, promises to revolutionize data center networks that suffer from a bandwidth bottleneck and hierarchical structure. However, the lack of adaptable and fast optical switch control schemes, the lack of optical buffers for contention resolution, and the high cost of clock and data recovery (CDR) impede the practical deployment of optical switches in data centers. Networking communities have tried to address these challenges from different perspectives. However, the proposed solutions may be interdependent and thus introduce unexpected issues. In this article, a synergistic optical switch control mechanism is proposed to simultaneously solve the aforementioned challenges. The developed label control technique allows for controlling and configuring packet switching within 43.4 ns. The implementation of clock distribution achieves a fast CDR of 3.1 ns at low cost, and the design of an optical flow control protocol prevents packet loss caused by packet contention.