Simple Optical Fabrics for Scalable Terabit Packet Switches

J. M. FINOCHIETTO, R. GAUDINO, G. GAVILANES, F. NERI,

Pekin, China

Conferencia; IEEE International Conference on Communications; 2008

The design of fabrics for terabit packet switchesneeds to consider the limitations imposed by electronic technology;in particular, power consumption and dissipation, aswell as power supply and footprint requirements. These issuesmake more difficult to package a packet switch in one singlerack of equipment, thus, optical links start being used tointerconnect the line cards with the fabric. In this paper, weconsider the use of an optical interconnection architecture thatrequires wavelength agility at line cards to control switchingdecisions. The actual feasibility and scalability of this approachis analyzed by considering different optical fabric alternatives tointerconnect the line cards. The main contribution of the paperis the characterization of these optical fabrics in terms of theirpower penalties, and the analysis of the port count and bandwidththese architectures can offer to build terabit packet switches.