Optical Interconnection for Datacenters: To Switch or Not to Switch

Abstract

Optical interconnection is seen as a promising solution to alleviate the congestion problems inside datacenters. Previously reported studies focus solely on optical circuit switching to establish connections. In this work we compare performance of these previous schemes with a model where static optical channels are deployed. A switch architecture using only demultiplexers and couplers is proposed for datacenter optical interconnection, and its performance is compared with that of WSS based switch. Results obtained by simulation show that the performance of the proposed simpler interconnect approaches that of the WSS-based one when datacenter traffic profile follow normal random distributions.