A Multi-Floor Arrayed Waveguide Grating Based Architecture With Grid Topology for Datacenter Networks

This paper proposes a grid topology based passive optical interconnect (POI) architecture that is composed of multiple floors of arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) to offer high connectivity and scalability for datacenter networks. In the proposed POI signal only needs to pass one AWGR, and thus can avoid the crosstalk accumulation and cascaded filtering effects, which exist in many existing POI architectures based on cascaded AWGRs. Meanwhile, due to high connectivity, the proposed grid topology based POI also has the potential advantage of high reliability. Simulation results validate the network performance. With a proper node degree, the proposed grid topology can achieve acceptable blocking probability. Besides, steady performance is kept when the number of floors increases, indicating good scalability of the proposed POI.