Abstract
Optical space switches are key elements for the next generation of switching
fabrics in backbone routers, high performance computing systems, and large data
processing and storage systems. A number of architectures and alternative options for
gating elements have been proposed, assessed, and implemented for a limited port count.
The challenge is to further enhance the scalability and energy efficiency of space
switches to support future traffic loads. This paper proposes a heterogeneous
implementation of the space switches based on two different types of gating elements,
namely semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) and Mach-Zehnder Interferometers (MZI).
With respect to the existing homogeneous implementations, a higher energy efficiency can
be achieved by minimizing the number of SOAs, but crosstalk is introduced by MZI. To
reduce the power consumption while still guaranteeing adequate physical layer
performance, the design of both Spanke and multi-stage architectures is optimized by
strategically placing the different gating and amplification elements, and a physical
layer analysis is carried out to validate the performance. The proposed heterogeneous
implementation is able to achieve power savings up to 10% and 50% in the Spanke and
multi-stage Beneš architectures, respectively, with respect to SOA-based space-switch
implementations. Moreover, an improvement of the physical layer performance is
achievable in the Spanke architecture thanks to the different placement of the
SOAs.
© 2013 IEEE
PDF Article
More Like This
Cited By
You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.
Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription