System Performance Assessment of an Optical Wireless Data Center Network based on Photonic Integrated Multicast Switch

We propose an OW-DCN using a nanoseconds photonic integrated SOA based multicast switch chip to realize fast optical packet switching. System experiments with a fabricated 4×2 switch chip in a 4×4 rack OW-DCN show a WDM multicast switch operation at 50Gb/s with <1.5dB power penalty.

Introduction

Driven by the ever-increasing 5G applications and cloud computing paradigm, heterogeneous traffic volumes have to be handled by a data center network (DCN) [1]. Conventional multiple-layer DCNs, which are based on electrical switches and fiber connections, suffer from significant problems of low bandwidth, high latency, poor scalability, low flexibility, high cost, and high energy consumption. These aforementioned problems require architectural and technological innovations of DCN solutions to satisfy the scalable growth in traffic volumes. The optical wireless DCN (OW-DCN) employing optical switch technology and optical wireless communication could be an attractive solution. The transparent optical networks with fast optical switching technology eliminate the O/E/O conversion, resulting in low power consumption with high data rates [2]. At the same time, wireless technology makes it possible to move towards ultra-high data rates and high flexibility with a wide unlicensed spectrum range, negligible waveguide dispersion and attenuation [3], as well as plug-and-play wireless modules.