High-performance optical packet switching network for green data centers

A five-year-long R&D program (2011~) funded by NICT, Japan will be outlined, which aims at developing optical packet switching (OPS) network for green data center (DC) accommodating huge number of servers. The consortium includes four institutes; NTT Laboratories, NEC Corp., Osaka University, and Kyushu University. In the intra-DC network, hybrid optoelectronic packet routers (HOERs) are interconnected with 100Gbps (25Gbps × 4 wavelengths) links. A novel “Express path” is proposed to enables the flow control. The traffic, which is part of a flow, can be bypassed the intermediate nodes and directly forwarded to the destination through the express path. On the other hand, an individual packet is processed and forwarded by the HOERs. OpenFlow will be introduced to enable the flow control in a centralized fashion. At last but not the least, a drastic reduction of the power consumption is expected due to a substantial offload from the packet forwarding by using the proposed the express path as well as low-power photonic hardware of HOER.