Data Center Switch Based on Temporal Cloaking

Data centers have become the major technology for collecting, storing, and processing information. The latency requirement for transferring information between servers has become more stringent from year to year as the speed of the new generation of servers increases at an almost exponential pace. In this paper, we propose a new method to compress switching information over data sequence packets using temporal cloaking. The main advantages of this method in comparison to electronic switching or the use of microelectromechanical system technology are that the compression and removal of the switching information are done entirely in the optical domain without increasing the packet duration time, changing or adding overhead bits, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio, or distorting the polarization or the phase of the signal. Only a small delay is added to the signal due to the cloaking process. This method requires tight synchronization; to address this issue, a mathematical model that describes the effect of clock jitter on the system bit error rate performance is derived in this paper. The same concept could also be used to increase the capacity of legacy communication systems as well as in coherent digital communication or analog communication, e.g., radio over fiber.

I. Introduction

The importance of high-end data centers development lies in their ability to solve complex problems in many areas of technology and science, for example, to provide cloud computing facilities for enterprises, to enable multiplayer games, or to process quickly stock market data and algorithmic trading. These applications are significantly changing the implementations of the next-generation data center and scaling up its performance [1]. The present data centers are a massively parallel super-computing infrastructure, which consists of clusters with thousands of servers networked together. A typical data center cluster includes servers arranged into racks of 20–40 machines, where the servers within the same rack are connected through a top-of-rack (TOR) switch. Rack switches are connected to cluster switches which provide connectivity between racks. The cluster switches create the part of the fabric for warehouse-scale data centers [2]. It has been suggested that increased performance needs can be accommodated by means of a shift in technology from the electrical to the optical domain. As a result, a significant amount of work has been done in order to integrate optical technology into the data center infrastructure using fibers [1]–[3] or free space optics [4], [5]. However, the core of the technology, such as InfiniBand used in many of the switches in data centers, is still electronic.