Wavelength and Space Division Packet Super-Channel Switching System for Future Data Center Optical Networks with a Switching Capacity of 53.3 Tb/s/port

Data center (DC) traffic is expected to grow at a staggering annual rate over the next years. However, current DC networks, making use of point-to-point optical links and electronical switching systems, may be unable to meet this traffic demand with a reasonable energy consumption. Moreover, DC network traffic, characterized by dense matrices and bursty hot-spots, constitutes an additional challenge for DC networks designers. To address the capacity and energy bottlenecks and meet the traffic demands in future DC networks, this paper proposes a novel high-capacity optical switching system that employs time division multiplexing (TDM), wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), and space division multiplexing (SDM) to realize coherently modulated packet spatial super-channels (pSSCs). This optical switching system is based on three newly developed core-joint switching subsystems: an electro-absorption (EA)-based joint switch with ns switching speed, an acousto optical modulator (AOM)-based joint switch with µs switching speed, and a free-space mirror-based joint switch with ms switching speed. These switching subsystems are used in a network testbed to experimentally demonstrate a 2×2 switching node with 64 wavelength channels, 7-core pSSCs modulated at 32 GBd. The results confirm a record switching capacity of 53.3 Tb/s/port and network protection in case of a multi-core fiber (MFC) failure in less than 10 ms.