With the rapidly increasing aggregate bandwidth requirements of data centers there is a growing interest in the insertion of optically interconnected networks with high-radix transparent optical switch fabrics. Silicon photonics is a particularly promising and applicable technology due to its small footprint, CMOS compatibility, high bandwidth density, and the potential for nanosecond scale dynamic connectivity. In this paper we analyze the feasibility of building silicon photonic microring based switch fabrics for data center scale optical interconnection networks. We evaluate the scalability of a microring based switch fabric for WDM signals. Critical parameters including crosstalk, insertion loss and switching speed are analyzed, and their sensitivity with respect to device parameters is examined. We show that optimization of physical layer parameters can reduce crosstalk and increase switch fabric scalability. Our analysis indicates that with current state-of-the-art devices, a high radix 128 × 128 silicon photonic single chip switch fabric with tolerable power penalty is feasible. The applicability of silicon photonic microrings for data center switching is further supported via review of microring operations and control demonstrations. The challenges and opportunities for this technology platform are discussed.

We present the design and experimental evaluation of an Optical Multicast System for Data Center Networks, a hardware-software system architecture that uniquely integrates passive optical splitters in a hybrid network architecture for faster and simpler delivery of multicast traffic flows. An application-driven control plane manages the integrated optical and electronic switched traffic routing in the data plane layer. The control plane includes a resource allocation algorithm to optimally assign optical splitters to the flows. The hardware architecture is built on a hybrid network with both Electronic Packet Switching (EPS) and Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) networks to aggregate Top-of-Rack switches. The OCS is also the connectivity substrate of splitters to the optical network. The optical multicast system implementation requires only commodity optical components. We built a prototype and developed a simulation environment to evaluate the performance of the system for bulk multicasting. Experimental and numerical results show simultaneous delivery of multicast flows to all receivers with steady throughput. Compared to IP multicast that is the electronic counterpart, optical multicast performs with less protocol complexity and reduced energy consumption. Compared to peer-to-peer multicast methods, it achieves at minimum an order of magnitude higher throughput for flows under 250 MB with significantly less connection overheads. Furthermore, for delivering 20 TB of data containing only 15% multicast flows, it reduces the total delivery energy consumption by 50% and improves latency by 55% compared to a data center with a sole non-blocking EPS network.

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Dynamic optical networking has promising potential to support the rapidly changing traffic demands in metro and long-haul networks. However, the improvement in dynamicity is hindered by wavelength-dependent power excursions in gain-controlled erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) when channels change rapidly. We introduce a general approach that leverages machine learning (ML) to characterize and mitigate the power excursions of EDFA systems with different equipment and scales. An ML engine is developed and experimentally validated to show accurate predictions of the power dynamics in cascaded EDFAs. Recommended channel provisioning based on the ML predictions achieves within 1% error of the lowest possible power excursion over 94% of the time. We also showcase significant mitigation of EDFA power excursions in super-channel provisioning when compared to the first-fit wavelength assignment algorithm.

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