Performance analysis of optical interconnects' architectures for data center networks

Electrical interconnects in Data Center Networks (DCNs) suffer from various problems which include high energy consumption, high latency, fixed throughput of links and limited reconfigurability. Introducing optical interconnects in DCNs help to reduce these problems to a large extent. Optical interconnects are the technology of the future. To implement optical switching in DCNs various optical components are used which include wavelength selective switch, tunable wavelength converter, arrayed waveguide grating, semiconductor optical amplifier based switch, wavelength division multiplexers and demultiplexers. All these optical components vary the shape, attenuate the optical signal and introduce time delay in bits. A comprehensive study of various architectures for optical interconnects in data center networks (DCN) is carried out. Performance of various architectures is investigated in terms of jitter, bit error rate (BER), receiver sensitivity and eye diagram opening. It is also investigated how different optical components used in optical interconnects in DCNs are effecting the signal degradation in different architectures. The paper concludes with the categorization of the signal degradation types in optical interconnects in DCNs and ways to reduce them. This enables the design of low BER optical interconnects in DCNs.