Nanosecond optical switching and control system for data center networks

Electrical switching based data center networks have an intrinsic bandwidth bottleneck and, require inefficient and power-consuming multi-tier switching layers to cope with the rapid growing traffic in data centers. With the benefits of ultra-large bandwidth, high-efficient cost and power consumption, switching traffic in the optical domain has been investigated to replace the electrical switches inside data center networks. However, the deployment of nanosecond optical switches remains a challenge due to the lack of corresponding nanosecond switch control, the lack of optical buffers for packet contention, and the requirement of nanosecond clock and data recovery. In this work, a nanosecond optical switching and control system has been experimentally demonstrated to enable an optically switched data center network with 43.4 nanosecond switching and control capability and with packet contention resolution as well as 3.1 nanosecond clock and data recovery.