OPNp1-6: UTC based Controller for Scalable Time Driven Switching

As data traffic on the Internet continues to grow exponentially, there is a real need to solve the switch bottleneck by developing ultra-scalable switching fabrics and their control. Although in recent years there have been a lot of efforts to solve the switching fabric scalability problem, in the optical domain, the proposed solutions have been (very) expensive, (very) complex and (much) larger than electronic switching fabric alternatives. In order to increase scalability a coordinated universal time (UTC) based time-driven switching (TDS) is proposed. This novel low-complexity switching architecture capitalizes on the ubiquitous of UTC from GPS and Galileo. This work focuses on UTC-based FPGA (field programmable gate- array) controller that was implemented for controlling the TDS switch prototype at the University of Trento, Italy. The switch controller facilitate dynamic configuration of ultra scalable switch. The prototype is implemented using off-the-shelf components. TDS architecture is especially suitable to support high capacity streaming media applications over the Internet.