The transformation of datacentres to support the increasing traffic growth requires the development of new technologies to migrate to 1.6T optical transceivers and to ultra-fast high radix optical space switches. In this work, an outline of the technological perspectives of TWILIGHT project is provided in accordance with research updates and industry standards.

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The NEPHELE hybrid electro-optical datacenter network (DCN) architecture is proposed as a dynamic network solution to provide high capacity, scalability, and cost efficiency in comparison to the existing DCN infrastructures. The details of the NEPHELE DCN architecture and its various key parts are introduced, and the performance of its implementation is evaluated through an end-to-end NEPHELE demonstrator, which was built at the National Technical University of Athens. Several communication scenarios are demonstrated in real time, exploiting a scalable optical data-plane architecture with a software-defined network (SDN) control plane capable of slotted operation for dynamic allocation of network resources. Real-time end-to-end functionality and integration of various software and hardware components are verified in a six-host prototype datacenter cluster.

We analyze the design of O-band SOA-based switch architectures in the IMOS platform. Emulated 16×16 switches, designed with different architectures, show a worst-case 3dB penalty for the case of 7 cascaded SOAs with 4-channel WDM@25Gbps.