Abstract
The energy-per-bit efficiency has quickly become the ultimate limiting factor in the design of a switching fabric for routers and data center networks. People are now turning to optics for solutions. If switch fabrics can be implemented with optics, many E/O and O/E conversions will be removed and tremendous power saving can be achieved. Arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) provide the most promising solution in this regard. But AWGRs have one fundamental limitation: poor scalability. While the realistic port count of an AWGR is likely to be less than 50, a switch for a data center network may need to interconnect one thousand racks, or more. This paper presents a novel AWGR-based switch architecture which, without using wavelength converters, can expand the switch size from N to
$N^{2}$
, where N is the number of wavelengths in the AWGR. Each port can transmit up to N wavelengths simultaneously. This makes the total capacity of the switch close to (
$N^{3}$
× bandwidth of a wavelength channel). A detailed analysis of the performance of the switch is provided in this paper.
© 2015 IEEE
PDF Article
More Like This
Cited By
You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.
Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription