Green photonics in switching

The global telecommunications network consumes approximately 1% of all electrical energy on the planet. A similar amount of electricity is consumed by the data centers and servers that are mushrooming around the planet, and providing an increasingly rich variety of services to Internet users. Importantly, the consumption of the network is growing rapidly, in lock step with the exponential increase in data in the network. In this talk, I will highlight the need to develop high-capacity and energy-efficient switching and networking technologies that can scale to cope with the increasing traffic loads and at the same time consume significantly less energy than today´s technologies. I will discuss the relative merits of photonics and electronics in a variety of switching scenarios and put the case for a research focus on green photonics in switching.