Energy-efficient, high-performance optoelectronic packet switching for intra-data center network

An energy-efficient, high-performance optoelectronic packet switching for intra-data center (DC) network is presented, in which hybrid optoelectronic packet routers (HOERs) are interconnected with 100 Gbps (25 Gbps×4 wavelengths) links. A novel “Express path (ExP)” is introduced to enable the flow control. Packets, which are a part of a flow, can be bypassed the intermediate nodes and directly forwarded to the destination through the ExP. This bypass allows substantial offload packets from the HOERs, while, on the other hand, an individual packet is processed and forwarded by the HOERs. OpenFlow controls both the flows and virtual machines (VMs) of server cluster in a centralized fashion. As a consequence, drastic reduction of the power consumption as well as low latency will be demonstrated with all-out proposed efforts in the hardware and the smart networking.