Flow controlled scalable optical packet switch for low latency flat data center network

Abstract

Bandwidth-hungry internet services like cloud computing, social networking and video sharing generate large volumes of packetized traffic within data centers (DCs). Inter-cluster communication bottleneck of current DCs tree topology causes fragmented pools of servers and high latency by employing a large port count (100s) optical packet switch (OPS) to flatten the DC network topology. However, the reconfiguration time of several OPS architectures with centralized control is port count dependent. Scaling the port count causes larger latency, and thus larger buffers for storing the packets in a flow controlled operation. We present numerical and experimental results that validate the operation of a flow-controlled optical packet switch cross-connect with distributed control and nanosecond packet switching/retransmission. Real-time operation of a random packet traffic generator with variable load, FIFO queue packet storing with buffer managers for packet retransmission, contention resolution and fast switch reconfiguration control have been implemented by using an FPGA.