A Multiport Microsecond Optical Circuit Switch for Data Center Networking

We experimentally evaluate the network-level switching time of a functional 23-host prototype hybrid optical circuit-switched/electrical packet-switched network for datacenters called Mordia (Microsecond Optical Research Datacenter Interconnect Architecture). This hybrid network uses a standard electrical packet switch and an optical circuit-switched architecture based on a wavelength-selective switch that has a measured mean port-to-port network reconfiguration time of 11.5 mu s including the signal acquisition by the network interface card. Using multiple parallel rings, we show that this architecture can scale to support the large bisection bandwidth required for future datacenters.