Data Center Switch Based on Temporal Cloaking

Data centers have become the major technology for collecting, storing, and processing information. The latency requirement for transferring information between servers has become more stringent from year to year as the speed of the new generation of servers increases at an almost exponential pace. In this paper, we propose a new method to compress switching information over data sequence packets using temporal cloaking. The main advantages of this method in comparison to electronic switching or the use of microelectromechanical system technology are that the compression and removal of the switching information are done entirely in the optical domain without increasing the packet duration time, changing or adding overhead bits, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio, or distorting the polarization or the phase of the signal. Only a small delay is added to the signal due to the cloaking process. This method requires tight synchronization; to address this issue, a mathematical model that describes the effect of clock jitter on the system bit error rate performance is derived in this paper. The same concept could also be used to increase the capacity of legacy communication systems as well as in coherent digital communication or analog communication, e.g., radio over fiber.