Design and Evaluation of Optical Circuit Switches for Intra-Datacenter Networking

With the rapid growth in intra-datacenter traffic, the high power consumption stemming from the huge number of electrical switches is becoming a critical issue. Hence, high-port-count optical circuit switches are urgently needed. In this paper, we overview recently developed optical circuit switch architecture based on two-dimensional switches, i.e., space switches and wavelength-routing switches. The attainable maximum switch port counts and hardware requirements are quantitatively evaluated through extensive computer simulations that consider 10-Gbps intensity modulation with direct detection systems, 43-Gbps differential quadrature phase-shift keying with self-coherent detection systems, and 128-Gbps dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying with coherent detection systems. The simulation results confirm the existence of switching architecture that can accommodate more than 1,000 ports with relatively light hardware requirements.