Design of SDN Enabled Electro-Optic Router Architecture in Verilog for Next Generation DCN

Modern high-performance Data Center Networks (DCNs) have delivered most new cloud-centric applications, such as big data, cloud computing, IoT, etc., to end users for the past few decades. Future DCN needs to be scalable, adaptable, and reconfigurable with low latency, high bandwidth, and low power consumption to meet the demand. Next-generation DCN combines the best features of optical circuit switching with electrical packet switching to satisfy this need, and it is now a developing field of study. This paper aims to develop an SDN-enabled Electro-Optic router in the Verilog platform and find the network's performance. The design and simulation are implemented using Xilinx ISE Design Suite with key sub-modules like MM1-Queue, Packet Classifier, Feedback Queue for electrical packet forwarding, Feedback Queue for optical packet forwarding, and FSM Controller. To verify the performance, 8-bit packets are randomly generated, and based on the threshold value the packets are either directed to the electrical or optical forwarding path. The testbench output shows the result and justifies our objective of implementing an SDN-enabled Electro-Optic router.